Jul 24
Where are the Google Knol Communities?
I’ve been compiling an ad hoc list of some of the communities that have immediately sprung up around Google Knol. Obviously the site itself has a ton of community (consider all the action on, say, this knol on writing knols), but there are other corners of the web for knol enthusiasts:
- There’s a group on Orkut (people still use Orkut?) with 314 members.
- A Facebook group with 380 members, but no activity since January.
- Knol Roll, the first of two Knol networks on Ning.
- The creatively named Knol Stuff looks to be the big winner, with 4344 members. I’m somewhat baffled by the forum, though, as most of the topics (boating education? Dance Nation?) don’t actually seem related to Google Knol (
Maybe the knol community will just live and succeed on Google’s servers?
July 25th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Someone said that Knol is the blog killer. What do you think?
July 25th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Useful round up - thanks for the pointer to Knol Roll - I’ll add a link back shortly.
It’s early days - Knol Stuff has focused on growth, rather than content, but they have been paying to be in Adsense for ‘knol’ since December. As a resutl, they have a lot of people just spamming the membership with fast bucks schemes.
We’re doing a slow burn at Knol Roll, and want to encourage a community that grows organically. Basically, there has been nothing to talk about since December last year, and now it is all go - there is finally something to see, and to work with. We’re at knolroll.net for the blog, or the Ning community is at http://knolroll.com.
I expect that a number of communities will grow for authors to collaborate and share - logically, this should be built into Google Knol itself - but there is always room for healthy independent forums. I’d expect the Google Knol team to actually, if they are clever, create a strong social network in this process.
Interesting times.
PS: Just as an aside, my first ever Knol “How to read russian in 75 minutes” reached Page 1 at Google in 1 day for the search term “read russian” - see http://thenextweb.org/2008/07/25/google-knol-how-i-reached-page-1-on-google-in-24-hours/
Regards, David
July 25th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Thanks for the heads up on these knol groups!
July 27th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
@radhoo Nah, I think that’s pretty silly. The kind of writing that Google Knol encourages–authoritative, well-researched and so forth, seems very different than what you get in the average blog. Plus, blogs are about storytelling (or at least posting) over time, not in one-shot articles.