Yes, it’s geeky, I agree 100% — and yet I’ve got to tell you that I enjoy browsing market research. And now I’ve got a whole wiki to do it in — MarketWikis is available at http://www.researchbuy.com/marketwikis/ .

The front page for this wiki has links to several different markets, though not a complete list (would that even be possible?) This wiki is not completely open, by the way — you do have to be registered to edit pages. Anyway, the markets listed here go from Abrasives Market to the Women’s Clothing Market.

I chose the Boat Dealers market at random and got an extensive page that provided information in several categories, including market structure, market metrics, industry players, and recent trends and developments.

Now, as I said you’re not going to find every possible market here. For what is here I find one good thing and about each article, one bad thing, and one thing I’m missing.

The good thing: these articles give me a great place to start. For example, I didn’t know who the main players were in boat sales. I can take the names I find here and go further with them, looking on other parts of the Web for additional dealer information. I would do that because of the bad thing: while there was a source list for every article that I looked at, facts were not cited directly — in other words there were no footnotes. Direct citations would help me a lot as a researcher. As it stands I would only trust this site as a starting point.

The thing I’m missing? A list of key words from each articles — companies, concepts, SOMETHING — that could quickly be turned into RSS feeds pointed at Google News or Yahoo News or some other fresh news source that offers RSS feeds. You could get an overview and start up setting up information traps at the same time.