New media: Qwiki

Qwiki boasts that it is a new ‘information experience’. In simple terms, it is a video encyclopaedia; a multimedia experience which mixes heavily read Wikipedia-sourced articles with photos and videos.

Qwiki would say that they are working to “deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search”.

Who will use it and why?

Qwiki claims to offer a new way to consume information – whether you’re planning a holiday, evaluating restaurants or doing research for school – this is a tool that will help everyone.

The platform presents data about millions of topics in a highly visual way. It has about 3 million reference topics at the moment and, according to their press release, hundreds of thousands of users.

Whether you enter the name of a famous person, place or thing, Qwiki will bring up a unique narrated slideshow with a voiceover detailing facts pulled from a range of media sources. From this page you can then click on sub-topics or related topics to access more Qwikis. Users can also “Improve this Qwiki” by recommending a photo or a YouTube video, making it a social experience.

The future

Since its initial soft launch Qwiki has already added features in the public alpha including “Share” or the ability to post, tweet, email or embed Qwikis as well as a text-based Contents section that includes all the information in a given Qwiki.

Qwiki plans to build on the initial buzz around its service by utilising new content sources, building an iPad app and eventually releasing a custom publishing platform which will allow publishers to transform their own content into a Qwiki.

While it is not a competitor to Google or Wikipedia at the moment, the whole idea behind integrating text, pictures and video into one entertaining, easy to consume package is what makes Qwiki so unique.