Over at ZDNet, Garett Rogers has spotted some potential intel about Google Knol. Over on Google Blogoscoped’s forum, Sally claims to know somebody inside Google:
He says it is not what Google call a “GP 1″ an “urgent” project.
He was called away to work on a GP1. He says the REAL name of the project is “Google’s Universal Encyclopedia” or “Uni Pedia”.
Hmm…’unipedia’ is a pretty awful name if you ask me. One reason that Knol was probably a compelling project name was that it was pretty much a Google Whack before the project launched. Unipedia definitely isn’t.
I’ve got my own, uh, Google-related contact. Here’s the skinny from them:
The whole “more urgent” project thing is a little misleading though. Inside Google, things are put into buckets. The so-called urgent stuff is core search and ads. Everything else is lower priority. So, it goes without saying that Knol (as well as things like Gmail, Talk, etc..) are lower priority.
It’s funny, but I never considered to check who owned Knol.com. Apparently it belongs to a Dutch steam cleaning company located in Dordrecht. It also turns out that ‘Knol’ is a city in the Netherlands.
The folks at Knol.com wrote up a little news piece about all the traffic they’ve been receiving. My Dutch is no better than my Swahili, but here’s how Babelfish translates their page:
This has resulted in tienduizenden visitors who just as a look came take on the Internet site of Knol.com!! in a short time we visitors had got from more than 130 land of concerning the complete world.
Er, I’m pretty sure that means they’ve had 10,000 visitors from over 130 countries. It’s a pity they don’t sell t-shirts or something, or they could make out like bandits.
Crawford Killian has been writing longer than most of us web-types have been alive. He’s on the third edition of his book Writing for the Web 3.0. I’ve been reading his blog for quite a while, and he recently posted a series of great web writing tips:
4. Keep paragraphs short.
In most fonts used on websites, six or seven lines should be enough for a paragraph. Even if it’s a long, complex idea that belongs in a long paragraph, break it up. A long, solid mass of screen text will discourage too many potential readers.
5. Put a little white space between paragraphs.
A short line at the end of a paragraph isn’t enough of a break. Just one hit on the Return key can make a world of difference in helping people read your text.
Given the name of this blog, I had to get around to this sort of thing sooner or later. I’ll been composing some tips of my own, and finding others in the days ahead.
Siva Vaidhyanathan (who has a interesting if slightly paranoid-sounding blog) points to Peter Suber’s thoughts on knol’s impact on scholarly articles:
(1) Advantages of knols for peer-reviewed postprints: Full OA. CC licenses. Obvious visibility to search engines. Searchable full-text, not just metadata. Built-in community tools. Not PDF. Ad revenue option. Available to authors who don’t have a repository in their institution or discipline. (2) Drawbacks: May require porting the text and reformatting it with Google’s editing tools, not just a deposit. (How soon will someone write a flexible knols import-export tool?) Not built on free and open source software. Off-limits to journals permitting self-archiving only in the author’s institutional repository. Not affiliated with a research institution or research field. Long-term preservation efforts unclear. Stewardship by a for-profit corporation, not by academic librarians. (3) A wash: Not OAI-compliant, but does it need to be?
I, uh, don’t understand all of that, but I’m glad to hear that he’s encouraged.
On a Wikipedia talk page, I started a little discussion of how Knol is pronounced. Apparently somebody heard a report on NPR about Google Knol, and they say that it rhymes with ‘call’. That is, it sounds like the first syllable of the term ‘knowledge’.
That seems to make sense. Then a bit of debate ensued about difference pronunciations of ‘knowledge’, and the usual ‘reliable sources’ business and so forth. I gather we’re going to have to wait until a few Google employees say the word and it gets recorded for posterity. I’m liking the ‘knol equals call’ theory though–Occam’s razor and all that.
Seth is the brains behind Squidoo, one of the services frequently cited as threatened by Knol. Seth is the brains behind a lot of things, so I was eager to hear what he had to say:
Just as the acquisition of blogger led to an explosion in blogging software, Google’s Knol makes the space pioneered by Squidoo a lot more attractive. Apparently, the best thing that can happen to you if you pick Google as a platform is that they mimic you. This isn’t true in the restaurant business (it’s bad news for the farmers when a restaurant starts its own farm). This isn’t true for Hollywood (it’s bad news when the movie studios start their own film processing labs.) The nature of the Web, though, seems to be that because of the very openness of the system, imitation is the highest form of endorsement.
My day-job is in marketing. When we meet with potential clients (most of them are in technology), one of the questions I always ask is “who are your competitors?” I get immediately leery if the CEO responds “ah, we don’t have any”. You don’t a market without competitors, and obviously the bigger the market, the more competitors (and vice versa). I think that’s what Seth is getting at here.
I just read this on the talk page for Knol on Wikipedia, and a quick Google search confirmed it. The terms (masculine and feminine, I assume) both mean, well, ‘fuck’. Here, for example, is a Swedish version of a certain notorious Tenacious D song.
From a Swedish-English dictionary:
knullar [²kn’ul:ar] knullade knullat knulla(!)
ha samlag (may be taken as offensive)
English translation: fuck
‘Knulla Handen’ is a related term, for masturbation. I leave you to parse that one yourself. There’s no word on how to pronounce ‘knol’ yet, I can’t say how close the words sounds to each other.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to a bit of mainstream media coverage of the Google announcement. Here’s what the New York Times had to say:
Despite the existence of these services, as well as countless free tools for experts and ordinary people alike to share what they know online, Mr. Manber said Google thought many people who possessed useful knowledge did not publish it “because it is not easy enough to do that.”
Google declined to make Mr. Manber or anyone else available to discuss Knol, saying the project was an experiment that like many Google tests, might never be opened to the public.
Wow, “might never be opened to the public”, eh? That’d make this blog a big waste of time.
Web luminary and Wikipedia contributor Tim Bray weighs in on Knol and how they might compare to the world’s biggest encyclopedia:
Yeah, it’s a problem that being a Wikipedia editor is a less-lightweight activity than it used to be. But it’s not fatal. Being a gamer is less-lightweight too, and Warcraft draws millions. The fact that I can’t contribute as easily as I used to irritates me, but at the end of the day Wikipedia doesn’t really need me, it seems.
Udi’s one of the Really Smart Guys and Knol is a genuinely new approach. But I don’t think that there’s a really big problem that will drive people toward it.
On a related note, John Batelle elicited a quote from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales:
We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.
Very different from a wiki, and not likely to generate much of quality.
Maybe I ought to run a survey about predicting the long term effects of Google Knol entering the content creation market place?
I just wrote a book on social media marketing, so it was inevitable that I make a Facebook group for Google Knol. I did a quick search for Knol-related groups and pages, and the only one I found was Citizens Against Knol. They’re big proponents of Wikipedia:
So now along comes Google and their own version of a sum total data base….for profit… that will inspire two more competitors and so on and so on. Wikipedia offers the human race a chance to improve itself…if it were to continue on the way it is..perhaps some improvements are needed of course…but to every new science…there is a learning curve. What a shame that for the sake of making a dollar Google and others have chosen to start this epidemic…. instead of fostering Wikipedia and helping it to achieve its full potential.
I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia, and have contributed to the encyclopedia over the past couple of years. That said, I’m also enough of a capitalist to believe that competition does foster and improve. There’s probably space on the web for both Wikipedia and Google Knol. I’m not sure there’s room for all of Knol, Mahalo and Squidoo, but that’s another post.
