‘Swonderful, ‘Smarvelous Swik

I receive a subscription to eWeek at work which goes largely unread except for those times when I’m really bored. Fortunately, today was one of those boring days and so I picked up last week’s issue and flipped through at a brisk pace.
While most of the content was forgettable, one small blurb about a site called Swik lept out and caught my eye. What is Swik? Well, as the about page says:

Swik is a project to create a useful free-content directory for open source software. Swik was inspired by the wiki concept used by projects like Wikipedia and WikiWikiWeb. Anyone can edit Swik project pages, including you.

It’s basically a hybrid of Google, Freshmeat and a wiki. It provides a search function, allowing you to track down open source tools and projects by project name or category. It allows users to associate all manner of documentation and links with a particular project and, coolest of all, it has a sort of “autodiscovery” function for tools and projects it doesn’t yet know about. The methodology behind this technology isn’t clear to me, but if you search for a project Swik doesn’t know about yet, you can click on a link and cause Swik to make a “best guess” as to what project you’re thinking about. It will then import and utilize the information it discovers and associate it with the project you were searching for.
I’ve tried several projects (such as Blosxom) that weren’t previously listed in Swik and, while the process is by no means perfect, it actually did a remarkably good job of creating “stub” project pages for them.
All in all, I can see myself using it quite often. It’s wickedly cool. Or would that be “Swikedly cool”…?