Here’s a useful introduction to Sidewiki:

Here’s some examples of how it’s been used:

• John Maeda, President of RISD, adding to Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
• Michael Roizen, Cleveland Clinic physician, adding to CDC website about flu shot myths.
• Lonely Planet journalist Tom Hall recommends the Scottish Football museum.
• ProPublica General Manager Richard Tofel gives context by quoting ProPublica author Christopher Favelle on an article they featured.
• See many other examples by following googlesidewiki on Twitter.

Here’s my screencast showing how to see the comments:

The comments are not controlled by the site owner. Some organisations I’ve recently talked to are fearful of this lack of control. Others point out that conversations could be going on outside of the usual blog comment systems set up by bloggers. This BuzzMachine article and the accompanying Sidewiki comments are a useful contribution to the debate.

What can you do?

If you have a Google Webmaster Account – and have therefore proven that you are the site owner – you can write a special entry that will remain at the top of the comments. Just sign into Google, click the Sidewiki button on your browser and leave a short comment that everyone will see.

You should also closely monitor what’s being said before wading in there and replying to the comments. Thankfully Google makes Sidewiki comments available to anyone with an RSS reader (Firefox, Google Reader, My Yahoo etc). All you do is subscribe to this feed:

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/domainpath/www.YOURDOMAIN.com%2F/default?sortorder=updated&includeLessUseful=true

I’ve subscribed not just to feeds for domains that I manage for my clients, but to other interesting domains such as The Guardian, The BBC, The European Union, Google …

But recently the tool looks like becoming useful for web writers. Until early May the only way to find out what people were ‘tweeting’ about was to go to Monitter or Twitter search. Now you can see instantly what the most frequently used words are right now, just by going to your own Twitter home page.

During the swine flu panic of late April 2009, the most popular topic (known as ‘trending’) was ’swine flu’. A few weeks later I saw the addition of ‘H1N1′ as a trending topic. So anyone writing articles about swine flu would have been wise to include these two phrases, rather than the European Union’s favourite ‘novel flu’. Hardly anyone used the term ‘novel flu’ in their ‘tweets’, so you can bet that people weren’t typing that phrase into Google.

The main tools we use to find out what terms are ‘hot’, like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, have a time-lag of over a week. But with Twitter you can see the topical words that people prefer to use straight away – in real time.

Real-time Web

Some have hinted that Twitter may evolve into a search of the ‘now’ – what’s going on right now and what has been published now – about any subject people are interested in. They are currently looking into ways of factoring reputation into Twitter search.

Of course Google looks to fight back. Take a look at the link ‘options’ next time you do a Google search. You can now order by date so the most recently changed pages come up first. Google is apparently set to make lots of other changes so that their results show timely rather than just trusted pages. I’ll kep you posted…