Content Matters

Steve Goldstein and the crew at Alacra continue to explore the boundaries of the content market, with today's debut of the Alacra wiki.

Alacra was early to move to the blogging space, launching a b2b blog on their portal when most of us were just starting to experiment with personal blogging. 

Like the Alacra blog, the wiki is focused on the business information space.  They've created a half dozen or so categories, such as people, blogs, publishers and aggregators.  While the initial content is fairly modest, they've bulked up sections by including "Industry Spotlights" which provide aggregated content from the Alacra service.  Registered users can add content - bios, company profiles, product information, etc.

The wiki is a strong complement to the recently opened Alacra Store, offering pay-per-view access to many databases.  The wiki should help drive SEO traffic to the Alacra store and give users a reason to check back often.

The Wiki is a nice extension of Alacra's core offerings.  With a captive community of content users and providers, Alacra could become a very intriguing space for the sharing of product and service information.  Most wikis have relied upon enthusiasts in a given field to post, add and edit content.  It will be interesting to see if the b2b information industry generates enough activity to keep the content fresh and relevant. 

In the meantime, I applaud Alacra for continuing to push the envelope and take risks while many traditional publishers remain technological laggards.