We've all got so used to wikipedia now that it's easy to forget quite how amazingly brilliant it is. Every time I
look something up I find myself whizzing through links, being drawn along a tale of interchopped subjects which often leads in totally unexpected directions. Unlike a lot of 2.0 projects, everyone seems to have heard of it and uses it - right? And Alexa ranks it as one of the top ten sites in the world. Increasingly it comes up in my work with brands and companies trying to understand what networked environments mean for them because it's such a clear example of the issues - a collaborative space, run by individuals that is guaranteed to appear on the hallowed turf of Google page one. And despite the tooing-and-froing about its reliability, the fact is that wikipedia now has credibility and people trust it - check Weinberger for brilliant analysis as ever. Steve Rubel has done a great piece of analysis simply showing...
...the amounts spent on marketing by the top 100 advertisers in the US and where their wikipedia page appears on Google. Of course, the point is there is no link. No matter what a brand spends on whooshing themselves up the SEO ladder, wikipedia has created a highly visible, credible space that loads of customers are going to come across and believe.
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