Blogs, Wikis, and Bookmarklets. Oh my!

We've decided to move our blog to it's new home here at blog.productwiki.com (powered by Blogger). It was a bit of a pain to get the templates looking just right, but in the end I it was a pretty smooth move.

edit me!

We're in the middle of finishing up some new developments on the site. You may have noticed an edit this page link at the top-right corner of many of our pages. This link brings up a series of links that that allow you to change parts of the page. Want to change the title of a product? Simple. Add a new category? Just as simple.

adding products with a click!

The second new development has been this ability to add products in much the same way you would create bookmarks on del.icio.us. We haven't really been showcasing this yet on ProductWiki, but we have a bookmarklet installation that allows you to add products your personal lists, and to ProductWiki, with a couple of mouse clicks. Let's say you are on Amazon and you find a new CD you want for your birthday, just click the "Add to ProductWiki" bookmarklet and tag it as "birthday".

ProductWIKIWYG

March 9th, 2006 - We have finally done it! Last night ProductWiki launched a new update that included a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor. No more messing around with computer code-like wikitext. When contributing to ProductWiki you will see a toolbar at the top of the page that allows you to edit and format a document much like you would in your favourite word processor.

WYSIWHAT???

This technology is provide as open-source by FCKEditor under a public license. We would like to thank them for making such a great product that has seamlessly been integrated into our system.

You can try it out here.

ProductWiki: New and Improved!

February 23th, 2006 - We are a site of our word; we said we are ever-evolving, and it's true. You might notice some look-and-feel improvements as you browse our site. This is part of our ongoing project to make ProductWiki easier to use (and nicer to look at!). Come back often, as you never know when we might invent something like a time machine!

Simon says: "Tap it!"

February 9th, 2006 – We are excited to have launched a new ProductWiki feature last night. You may have already seen what we affectionately call the Quadrus on the product pages. It is an interactive element that encourages our community to tap it. The Quadrus allows you to say if you love, want, or have a product. Also, you can tag the product anyway you like. Tapping the Quadrus does several things:

1. helps build a sense of community
2. helps you organize products into lists
3. helps ProductWiki organize products

For an example of the list features, take a look at a portion of my cd collection and a sweet (yet inexpensive) DIY computer. We see a lot of potential in the Quadrus and user lists and we are hoping to develop this idea a lot further.

To go from "wiki" to "wicked"

January 27th, 2006 - We've put up the first of many updates to ProductWiki last night focusing on user experience. Included was the addition of user avatars and the preliminary work towards what we want to be a truly WYSIWYG editor.

We want to focus on what we believe sets us apart from the other shopping/consumer sites: our community.

One way we are doing this is by improving the user page so that you can write articles, participate in discussions, and upload images that you can attach to your profile.

In general, we are striving to make our site more accessible for browsing as well as contributing. I have started a suggestion thread so please post any comments you may have there.

A nuclear bomb?

January 25th, 2006 - If there is one thing that impresses me (other than the complete disillusionment of the contestants on American Idol), it's the nuclear bomb. What a step-up in
scale from all other bombs, it's like inventing a car that goes 1 million miles per hour (1.61 million km/h) with perfect cornering. Except this "car" can destroy all of mankind and the animal kingdom in one fell swoop.

Anyway, the top link on Digg the other day was for a Google Video of a 1958 underwater nuclear explosion. Obviously, our first thought: "This is exactly like ProductWiki, so let's set it to music and put it back on Google Video."

The explosion is a metaphor for the potential rapid rise in ProductWiki's popularity due to a video that has a metaphorical explosion representing ProductWiki's potential rapid rise in popularity due to a video.....

Wow! There are a lot of products

January 24th, 2006 - Perhaps you've noticed the total product count rising on our home page. When you start a ProductWiki one of the first things you try to do is estimate how many products you might have listed in it. Well, the answer is........

42

The only problem is that we haven't figured out how many zeros to put afterwards. We've been thinking it's somewhere in the range of 4-6. So how do we get there? Well, if we have 1000 people adding 6-7 products a day it will take about two years to get to 4.2 million products. Now, how do you get 1000 people to add 6-7 products a day?

Having just asked that rhetorical question; we are trying to make ProductWiki as useful as possible at all product counts. Right now we have 2300+ products and that has proven to be surprisingly useful. We want to create islands of comprehensiveness rather than trying to get the whole thing done right away. For example, if you are looking for toy robots or high-end turntables we do a pretty good job already.

From working on the wiki for 2 months now it's obvious that you have to take it in small steps. Nevermind that we need to grow 1000X to be comprehensive, but focus on the scooters, headphones, basketball shoes, chainsaws, televisions, and board games of the world and somebody, somewhere will find it useful. After all, the internet is a big place.

Software Update

January 17th, 2006 - We pushed out a new build of the site yesterday. Alongside the usual bug fixes we introduced some new features that allows a more powerful way to navigate the site. First off we now show more values per property that people can narrow by. We also introduced the ability to view all filters for a particular property. When viewing all values for a particular property the list can get quite long, but it isn't an issue when you're looking at more specific product categories. Still, we're developing a more advanced system that will handle a large number of different values gracefully.

Second major change is the ability to narrow by multiple values in the same property. So you can now do something like cell phones that have both MP3 Playback and FM Radio as features. Again, we have in development a more sophisticated system that allows even more refined product filtering that should be released in the near future.

Lastly, we've found that people are more interested in viewing the products themselves when narrowing by multiple properties. So we've changed the system so when there are multiple properties active you're automatically taken to the product listing page. The overview page still exists where you can see all the relevant articles and information, but the default is now the product listing page. Alongside that, we've changed the default sorting on the product listing page to be based on price. We liked the random sorting before because it allowed people to discover new products, but we're trying sorting by price for now to see if people find that more useful.

Originally posted by Omar on Jan. 17th 2006