BigShinyThing

We love the muppet wiki… and not just because thanks to it, we now know which episode our favourite muppet number ever is in (it’s Episode 401, hiking pigs). No, we love this particular wiki because it shows what wikis are all about: sharing knowledge.

People often complain that wikis aren’t ‘visual’ enough and that (ouch) they are even ugly. This is a typical web 1.0 vs 2.0 argument. Take that much-loved beast of web 1.0: Flash. We’ve written before about how misappropriated flash actually hides knowledge from both search engines and users. For evidence, see… oooh, pretty much any ad agency website you care to think of! At the core of what makes wikis tick is sharing knowledge and unless your site was designed by Eric Gill, concentrated knowledge (generally) ain’t pretty: it’s functional. Even a wiki about something as visually brilliant as the muppets on first look, looks, well a little vanilla. It’s only once you start to engage with the content (i.e. search ‘hiking’… the key signifier of our favourite muppet skit) that you start to see the real beauty of the knowledge within.

The “American Pigolo” shoot features clothes by Louis Vuitton and celebrates 50 years of the Muppets this year. Giorgio Armani (who famously did the clothes for the original film) must have refused to dress the pig.