Get ready for Marthapedia
Apparently Martha Stewart thinks wikis are a good thing. Which strikes me as odd, since the no-longer-jailed domestic doyenne built her multimedia empire pretty much by sitting you down and telling you how things are done, her way or the highway. She's a tastemaker, not some kind of San Francisco-Web-startup "community manager." Asking for readers to email in scrapbooking tips is one thing. But user-generated recipes? Communally edited herb-planting instructions? Heresy. The plans for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia to embrace wikis and other community features on a new website, announced by company president Susan Lyne, suggest to me more an attempt to embrace the bubbly valuations assigned to Web properties like MySpace and YouTube, rather than the egalitarian ideals of Web 2.0 proponents.