When is a Wiki Not a Wiki?

Google’s new tool Side-Wiki looks like a great new addition to the plethora of new tools coming out that are essentially plug-ins to the browser. For most sites that are simply presentations of information of various kinds, this new tools just creates a comment bar on the side. Even though it is called “Side-Wiki” it is not a wikipedia page at all, but just a set of visitors commentary on the information in the site. Normally this would be considered a cool thing, there is only one problem with it: Anyone can post anything, and if the page is your sales page, and the poster is your direct competitor they can post slander and libel against you and direct your prospects to go to their sites all while hosting it on your site!

That is an outrage! Because now all that work you did to create traffic and improve your site, to create your product and drive traffic can be destroyed by just a few clicks from an enemy.

What do you do? Well, if you are smart you get a blocker for Side-Wiki. A good blocker needs to be able to sandbox your site without screwing up any of the links, existing anchors, or data – it needs to be able to create random redirection, and should be keyed so you can see that the redirection is yours and not put in by some hacker or other spam tool.

So how does Google’s Sidewiki work, look at the picture below and you can get  good idea:

It can get Evil

What is happening is that with the Sidewiki tool bar you are really running two browsers at once. The first, your regular browser, is looking at your sales page, or as you see in the picture, at the Google search screen. The other browser which is hosted on the left side is communicating directly with the Giant Google Corporation, and accessing the Massive Google Database, and posting the various comments from the database to the sidewiki application.

Then what happens is that your competitor or person who simply does not like you (represented by Dr. Evil in the picture) decides to write all kinds of bad things about you, your business practices, your products and services, and then offers the same product for less money elsewhere. This drives all of your business away!

And there is nothing you can do about that as long as your site is not blocking sidewiki, anyone who has downloaded the new Google toolbar has this capability to see the bad things others have written about your site, and you are hosting it, at least that is how it appears to them.

You need some way to block this! You need an Ultimate Side-Wiki Blocker.

There are a few on the net, but most of these are remotely hosted scripts. If you put one of these on your site you are bound to have problems if that remote host goes down, or gets hacked. It is a much safer bet to get a script you can install on your own site. These scripts will work in your blogs as well as your straight sites, landing pages, mini-sites etc.

Look into a Side-Wiki blocker, like the one I offer – even if you decide not to use it, it should be in your toolbox!

-DTM

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.