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"ShopWiki, the wiki shopping site I reviewed on Mashable back in April, launched a new video service this morning.  The new feature allows users to create and upload video reviews to the site - you can see examples here and here.  Contributors can review individual products or compare items in a certain category.  To help populate the new video section, ShopWiki will pay $50 for the first 500 videos - payments will be made via Paypal.  The site also boasts a new Color Search tool which launched last week (Etsy has had a similar feature for some time).\nShopWiki was founded by Eliot Horowitz, DoubleClick Co-founder Dwight Merriman and former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan.  The product index is populated by a web crawl of 120,000 shopping sites and the site claims to have over 1,300 user-generated buying guides.  \nMy major criticism of ShopWiki was the expectation that users would upload content for free with no obvious payback (I don't necessarily mean monetary compensation - building a better community feel could also motivate users to join in).  They're now trying to pay contributors - at least the first 500 - so we'll see if they can get any traction there.  Nonetheless, I still can't understand why they're trying monetize the site with contextual ads, rather than inserting affiliate codes in the product links - ads distract users from the content, while affiliate links would merge the content and business model together.  On the other hand, perhaps ShopWiki is being used to research products, rather than actually buying them - but if that's the case, affiliate links would still add an extra revenue stream.\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/06/28/shopwiki-launches-video-reviews/>