#1 consumer wiki service reshapes discussion forum paradigm to make reading, discovering, and participating in collaborative online conversations easier than ever before

November 7, 2007 – Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com), the leading consumer wiki powering online community, today announced the availability of fully integrated Web 2.0 discussion forums for its rapidly growing community of nearly 600,000 wiki websites. Integration of discussion forums into the Wetpaint Wiki platform addresses key shortfalls of traditional message boards — buried information, inefficient organization, and repetitive questions.

“Forum technology has been in desperate need of an upgrade since the paradigm was established 20 years ago. We’ve been successful at transforming the wiki application into a flexible, easy, and powerful communication tool for everyday web consumers, and now we’re doing the same for message boards,” said Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint. “By seamlessly integrating discussion forums into the Wetpaint Wiki platform, we hope to provide consumers with the ultimate environment to collaborate online.”

While traditional forums generate billions of monthly pageviews, the technology and interface powering them have remained largely unchanged. As a result, it has been difficult for the communities they serve to extract any long-term value from the evolving conversation. Now that forums have been upgraded and innovatively incorporated into the Wetpaint Wiki platform, it is not only easier to carry on and follow a conversation, but to also convert the resulting information into content pages of enduring value and relevance for current and future participants.

With this latest release, Wetpaint delivers three distinct benefits that address problems inherent with traditional forums:

• With Wetpaint, the best information rises to the top: Within a Wetpaint Wiki, any threaded discussion can be converted into a fully editable wiki page, allowing the community to transform relevant conversations into content pages that can then be further improved upon through continued editing and collaboration.

• New discussion forums allow consumers to spend less time scrolling, browsing, and organizing: With Wetpaint, threaded discussions can easily be expanded inline to view posts — without waiting for the browser to refresh. Tags allow users to associate threads with keywords, making topics easy to find and track, and eliminating the need to be a forum expert in organization and cross-posting. Thread tags also enable users to conveniently discover related pages and discussions containing additional information.

• Wetpaint Wiki forum integration helps new users add value sooner: With older forums, the only way for new users to get involved was to dive in and start asking questions. There was no easy way to orient themselves within the community. Since Wetpaint combines wikis and forums into the same cohesive site experience, new users can engage in several different ways before they venture into the conversation. Parallel activities like reading content, making edits to pages, and creating a profile both help orient new users and introduce them to existing wiki members. When they do eventually jump into the conversation, they’re much better prepared to move the conversation forward rather than resurface the same old issues.

To try the new discussion forum functionality, visit Wetpaint.com, where you can start your own free public or private Wetpaint Wiki or join any of the featured wiki sites to see a newly integrated discussion forum in action.