Thursday, July 14, 2005 5:13 PM
Thanks to Law Professor (and
blawger) Gerry W. Beyer, I ran across a new website called
Tax Almanac. This is not your run-of-the-mill tax portal, but an experiment in using
Wiki technology to develop a living encyclopedia on Tax Law. I'll let the site's sponsor elaborate:
TaxAlmanac is a free tax research resource brought to you by Intuit (http://www.intuit.com). It is a revolutionary leap forward in how tax professionals research tax laws, create and share knowledge. Our goal is to transform tax research and to improve the effectiveness of tax professionals everywhere. TaxAlmanac draws on the power of community. Simply put, none of us is as smart as all of us. Content on TaxAlmanac is written by tax professionals from across the country and takes advantage of the knowledge of academia as well as practioners - in short, the real tax experts. The site includes key information that tax professionals find useful when conducting research - including the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, Tax Court Cases, and a variety of Articles. TaxAlmanac currently contains 7980 articles.
Wow, now that's a mouthful. But, as anyone who uses the increasingly powerful and useful across Wikipedia may tell you, Wiki technology, which is a sort of a living, breathing encyclopedia written by contributors worldwide, is exciting a lot of people (and venture capitalists) out there.
The fact that Intuit (and not just a couple of programmers working out of their bedroom) is behind the Tax Almanac is also telling. Changes are afoot and something leads me to believe that some companies' longstanding cash cows may in the cross hairs.