WetPaint Preparing Embeddable Wiki Product Called Balco

Seattle based wiki-startup Wetpaint has been talking to a number of big content sites about a new product they’ll be releasing soon, we’ve heard. The screen shot above is a mock-up that Wetpaint is using to pitch potential partners.

The product is an embeddable wysiwyg wiki. That alone is interesting, just because there aren’t any easy ways to embed a wiki into third party sites today. Google Sites doesn’t yet allow embeds, for example. PBWiki, a popular wiki startup, does allow embeds via their API, but it isn’t as simple to use as most widgets.

But what we’re hearing is that this isn’t a simple javascript or Flash embed. It’s a deeper integration that requires an insertion of code into a site’s back end application files. That allows the wiki to be created at the server level, not simply rendered in the user’s browser like most widgets. The idea is a pretty straightforward way to go about doing this, although we haven’t heard of any products doing this before.

Why is that interesting? It’s interesting because it pulls the Wiki content directly into a site’s HTML and allows it to be indexed by search engines. That means partner sites will get the SEO benefits of the wiki, a major plus for these partners.

That’s all we know for now. The product is being called Balco, although that may be an internal project name, not the name of the to-be-launched product. If Balco is as useful as we’re hearing, it’s definitely something we’ll use here at TechCrunch.

Update:
PBWiki’s David Weekly adds something related to this in his API documentation (scroll to bottom). When/if Wetpaint launches Balco, we’ll do a side by side comparison.