Dec 14
Every Smart Web Guy Reacts to Google Knol
For a Friday two weeks before Christmas, the web is sure abuzz about Google’s decloaking of their new project. As Techmeme indicates, pretty much everybody who’s anybody in the Web 2.0 space has contributed his or (occasionally) her two cents on the revelation. I perused some of the tech luminaries blogs, and these were the most interesting comments I found.
From the chapeau’d Om Malik:
Which is to say that they won’t start making knols appear higher in the search results. Maybe it is the jet lag, but I don’t see knols as revolutionary as others are making them out to be. After all, you can set up a blog, make an expert page, maintain it and even put Google Ad Sense to monetize it. So how does this make knols special?
From Nick Carr:
The success of Knol is, of course, far from assured, but the ability of authors to sign their names, take ownership of their work, and compete with other authors may well be a lure for many people…For the past year, Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales has been doing a lot of trash-talking about taking on Google in the search business. Now Google’s striking back.
Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere, but having said that they do rely on Google for a good portion of their traffic. If Wikipedia is replaced in the first few results on Google with pages from Knol, Wikipedia traffic will decrease, and possibly as a consequence so will broader participation on Wikipedia.
From Philipp Lennsen, on the world’s most popular non-Google blog on Google:
Then again, Knol seems to want to offer incentive for experts in terms of recognition, and money as well, two aspects lacking in Wikipedia. Also, if projects like Wikipedia get some good large-scale competition, it might help Wikipedia too. At this time, Wikipedia’s editing tools for instance are somewhat cluttered and don’t have the best usability.
Finally, my fellow Canadian Matthew Ingram:
I think this could be huge. A more authoritative version of Wikipedia, compiled by experts and powered by Google? Not only that, but as Paul Kedrosky points out, the pages come with Google ads, and authors get a revenue share — he says (and I agree) that it could hurt not just Wikipedia but Mahalo and plenty of others, especially if those pages start to rank highly in Google searches.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Here’s another one from Anil Dash: “Google has not proven that it understands content creation and publishing as well as it understands its core businesses of search and advertising, or even its ancillary tools for communication and collaboration.”
December 17th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Hey you forgot me Darren!
Every smart web person should be right on top of this issue, as you point out - and good to see that you are wading in by string this blog. I suspect that Goolge might be playing us all to see whether they should or should not launch this (and they may do so with a different name), but I think the word ‘knol’ is going to stick and it’s a game-changing play (and possibly a dangerous new game for Google).
I’ve added a story at my blog http://digitalbiographer.com/2007/12/15/knol-is-on-a-roll-googles-new-economy-for-online-authors/ but rather than a blog, I’ve started a discussion for interested parties in a Ning network at http://knolroll.com - please do join - it’d be good to have a link to your content added.
Best from Scotland,
David Petherick | Digital Biographer