(click to enlarge)

It’s interesting and hypnotic to sit and watch where in the world the most recent article update has occurred. It’s sort of educational to witness the sequence of article edits, too, because I think it gives one a real feel for how fast articles can get edited, reverted, re-edited, etc. Just while watching it all unfold, I’ve witnessed little minor tiffs as someone in South America edits and article and then someone in Canada shortly after goes and reverts the edit or adjusts it as well.

The mashup is created by László Kozma, and it’s inspired by David Troy’s FlickrVision which allows you to see the most recent photos uploaded by endusers on a worldwide map.

One thing that I’d suggest that László might add to this: display the username of the person who’s making the edit in the little pinpoint cloud, hyperlinked to their user page!

One of the benefits that can no longer be gained is link juice. That’s because rel=nofollow has just been instituted across all of Wikipedia and its sister sites (such as Wikinews).

Does that mean you no longer need to concern yourself with Wikipedia? Heck no! It is still a valuable source of traffic and, just as importantly, credibility. To have a Wikipedia entry for your company show up in the top 10 in Google for your company name gives a nice credibility boost. Even better if the coverage on your entry is favorable!

Wikipedia is still key to the discipline of “reputation management.” By understanding the ins and outs of Wikipedia — navigating the landmines of notability criteria, not contributing your company’s entry yourself, disambiguation pages, redirects, User pages, Talk pages, etc. — you can potentially influence what is said about you on Wikipedia. Furthermore, if web pages that are critical of your company occupy spots in the first page of the SERPs, you can push them out and replace them with your Wikipedia entries. Because Wikipedia holds so much authority and TrustRank, it’s easy to get an entry into the top 10 for any keyword.

Back to the nofollowing of external links… I don’t think SEOs will leave Wikipedia any time soon due to this new development. Even though that was Jimbo Wales’ hope.

There is still significant incentive for SEOs to edit (and manipulate) Wikipedia so long as Wikipedia holds the top spot for important keywords such as “marketing” in Google.