Is it just me or has everyone jumped onto the wiki bandwagon? It started with the Million Dollar Wiki (which was really just a different take on the Million Dollar Homepage). We then saw our bovine friend start something called the Million Euro Wiki, offering a rather lucrative affiliate program (use coupon code MichaelKwan to save ten bucks). More recently, I’ve seen the emergence of the Five Dollar Wiki, offering wiki goodness for even less money.
The issue, if you can call it that, with most of these paid wiki sites is that you purchase a single page. You go out and buy a term like blog and you get a single wiki page to edit as you see fit. Taking this personalized wiki concept to a whole new level is the something called ScribbleWiki. Instead of giving you just one page, you get an entire wiki site. You can use this site to make as many wiki pages as you’d like, complete with full Wikipedia-esque styling. This ReviewMe request couldn’t be more timely.
A Whole Wiki Website To Yourself
Well, you don’t your own personalized domain. Instead, you get a subdomain on scribblewiki.com. For example, I nabbed blog.scribblewiki.com, updating the front page with a bunch of affiliate links for my online money-makers.
I could start up a few more wiki pages, talking about different blogging platforms, blogging strategies, or the cheeseburger I had for lunch. It’s mine and I can do with it what I like. I do assume, however, that ScribbleWiki has some sort of restriction against using it for, ahem, adult services.
Customization and Administration
You’ll notice in the screenshot above that I customized the logo in the top-left corner. You can upload whatever image you’d like as the logo, and just like Wikipedia, there’s an image upload tool. Each picture uploaded ends up with a URL similar to http://blog.scribblewiki.com/Image:Mkbanner-wiki.jpg. Logging into your personal Wikipedia is very easy, because your user account is the same as the one you used to register the wiki in the first place.
Unfortunately, a problem arises when you try to log into your account on the main ScribbleWiki homepage. When I plunked my username and password into the fields on the main page, I got this:
Yeah, a blank page. Not good. I emailed them for some wiki help after I couldn’t find anything through the support wiki. They recommended that I try the alternate login page and that worked. For further customization and helpful hints, you can hit up the aforementioned support wiki where you will find the FAQ. They also talk about basic wiki formatting stuff there too, in case you’re not familiar.
Even a Free Wiki Has a Price
You knew this part was coming, right? Although ScribbleWiki will get you a fully functional wiki site for free, they have strategically placed a 468×60 Adsense unit at the top of your site and it appears on every page. Naturally, all impressions and clicks generated are 100% theirs, completely leeching off of your original content. In essence, you’re working for them for free… unless you convert on some affiliate deals or something.
To get rid of the advertisement, you’ll have to upgrade to a premium account and that costs $5 a month. Interestingly, there’s no mention of this anywhere on the main site. You have to login to see it.
Interesting Concept, Poor Support
I think that the idea behind ScribbleWiki is an interesting one, because it can offer you so much more than a single wiki page sold elsewhere. However, you will not enjoy the traffic benefits of having a single page on a bigger wiki, because the main ScribbleWiki homepage does not link to your subdomain. I also found the supporting documentation on the homepage to be lacking and it was not immediately obvious how to upgrade to a premium account. They should be more forthcoming with this kind of information, perhaps including it as part of a FAQ page.
That, and my initial reading of the domain was ScrabbleWiki rather than ScribbleWiki. Imagine my disappointment when I couldn’t land a triple word score.
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