If you’re launching a web project in 2008, I think RSS should be as essential a feature as, say, broad browser compatibility. This is ten-fold true if you’re launching a community-oriented information database like Google Knol. And yet they seem to have launched without any RSS support.
Wikipedia has had RSS since mid-2006. They more recently added the much sought after watchlist feed, so that editors could monitor changes to articles they work on.
As far as I can tell, there are no RSS feeds in Knol. A few I’d like to see include:
A firehose feed of all new articles.
A revisions feed for every article, like Wikipedia.
A feed for changes to my knols only.
A feed for comments on my knols.
I’m sure there are a lot of other ways one might slice the data ouput of Knol. And, in truth, I’m sure it’s a feature in the plans for future iterations of Google’s service. It is a little shocking that it didn’t get baked into version 1.0, though.
Over at Mashable, Mark has written an article pointing out that, only three days after Knol’s release, nefarious SEO types are experimenting with ways to spam Knol:
The time for speculation as to when this will occur, though, is past. A while back I somehow got subscribed to a list belonging to a maker of splog automation software by the name of Peter Drew. He’s since moved to the semi-legitimate world of automated article creation software, but relies on very suspect methods of revenue, affiliate marketing and SEO generation to promote his software.
This morning I received the URGENT ALERT that a mere three days after the launch of Google’s Knol, he’s already created an automated Knol article generator.
I’m not sure that ‘automated article creation’ qualifies even as ’semi-legitimate’. Nonetheless, Mr. Drew has developed a piece of software colourfully named the Badass Google Knol Dominator. Here’s an introductory video:
It’s basically an automatic article submitter. Which, on the surface, doesn’t seem that problematic. However, as Mark from Mashable points out:
As you can tell, the purpose of this software isn’t to create valuable “Knol units” or to spread the altruistic dream of free knowledge for all, but to create Knols with the purpose to squat on as much namespace as possible while attempting to reap the rewards of high value links from the Google domain these articles will sit on.
I don’t know much about anti-spam tactics, but I assume there are some pretty simple strategies to block tools like Mr. Drew’s. Captchas would probably be effective, as would some kind of restriction on the number of submissions per hour.
People are going to try to game Knol just as they try to game every other money or link generating site on the web. It’s just the latest chapter in an arms race between companies and the parasitical strategies people employ to exploit them. Google has lots of experience to bring to bear on the problem, so I expect they’ll do a decent (though imperfect) job of separating the wheat from the chafe.
You know, it’s shocking how many Web 2.0, user-content-generation sites launch without providing any kind of metrics to their users. It took, like, four years for Flickr to add detailed stats about who was looking at my photos, and YouTube was similarly slow on the stats front.
Google’s got plenty of examples to learn from. And yet they seem to have launched without any user-facing statistics. There are comments and reviews, but there’s no way to judge how many visitors your knol is receiving.
If you enable AdSense revenue sharing on your knols, you may be able to get a view into your knols’ popularity. AdSense normally reports how many impressions an ad has received, so maybe this functionality will extend to ads on knols.
That said, Google obviously has some readily-available technology to provide plenty of analytics to its users. I assume they haven’t rolled out these features because, in the early days, they don’t want to advertise low performing pages?
