In today’s advanced world, million of people around the world head to social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter everyday to connect with their friends or co-workers online. Celebrities of any expertise are not an exception too. To garner more fans, they would not hesitate to create a Facebook fan page or Twitter profile to stay in touch with their Internet-savvy fans worldwide. Let’s take for example popular prankster and actor Ashton Kutcher. Although he might be quite popular in the United States, however, after joining Twitter, an increasing number of people outside the US who knows nothing about his celebrity status have started to gain some knowledge about him. After all, he has emerged to clinch the top spot of having the most number of followers, beating “rivals” Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey and CNN.
Finding your favorite celebrities on these social media may be relatively quite easy but with Jockipedia, it’ll be effortless. This site is wiki that aggregates athletes’ genuine social pages such as Facebook and Twitter. With this simple definitive listing of links of every athlete in the world, fans can search for their sports idols, view their profiles and connect with them on the social web by visiting their pages. For each profile, there will be links to their social networking profiles – Twitter feeds, own personal blogs, Facebook and MySpace pages, their own websites, photo galleries such as Flickr and Shutterfly, video channels like YouTube and Motionbox and even a foundation or charity website.
Besides links, there is also photo accompanied by a short bio which states several personal information about the athlete. For example, his/her birth date, birth place, career start, sport, league, team, position and even his height. The site operates on a Wikipedia-like format and invites users to create pages for athletes not listed and add missing links (or correct bad ones) on existing pages. Even younger athletes from college or high schools (whether they are professional or amateur) can create their own athlete pages to reach out to their Internet-savvy friends or peers on the web.
Overall, I personally find that Jockipedia is indeed an amazing and unique creation. By combining both the popular social networking platforms and a wiki together, this creates a great opportunities for athletes to connect or reach out their fans online and vice-versa. However, it should include more information about a particular athlete just like what Wikipedia is doing. As a result, readers are then able to get a comprehensive view about him or her without the need to head to Wikipedia to find out more.
Jockipedia is created by Douglas Warshaw, a former network news producer and features over 3,600+ athletes around the world. Users can search for their profiles by names, leagues, sports or countries. He has a great goal in mind – “to have every athlete in the world featured in Jockipedia”. Will this near-impossbile mission be accomplished? Well, it got to depend on you and me.