Write Great Google Knols

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?

I thought I’d do a quick round-up of reactions to Knol from some prominent corners of the web. I’ll skip the basic facts, and focus on the analysis:

• Danny Sullivan on the lack of any browse-centric navigation: “At first I thought this odd, but then it made a lot of sense. I certainly never go to the Wikipedia home page to browse my way to a Wikipedia entry. Usually, I get to an entry by searching for the topic (and typically from having done that search on Google itself).”
• Jason Kincaid worries that the financial incentive of AdSense means that users will ignore less popular subjects: “We’re going to start seeing a flurry of articles on the most popular content - expect to see dozens of biographies on Barack Obama and John McCain in the next few days. For these popular subjects the system should work well - a few lucky (and hopefully credible) articles will rise to the top, and the rest will fade away.”
• Jordan McCollum is concerned about the many-knols-on-one-topic quandary: “But, to ask search engines’ perennial spam-defining question, is it good for users? You find six—or sixteen or sixty—pages on druidic religions—which do you read? Who do you believe when they disagree? And how do you find them and know that there are other knols on the same topic?”
• Arnold Zafra sounds underwhelmed: “Wikipedia doesn’t have to worry about Knol. Despite the Google branding its not and will never be a Wikipedia killer. Knol is more of a “socialized”, free-for-all, anyone-can-be-an-author version of About.com.”
• Like many, MG Siegler is concerned about Google playing fair with knols in search results: “What if Google highlights knols in someway different from other results? Look at what it does for YouTube videos and other Google content with its universal search.”
• Over at Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen compares the Wikipedia vs. Knol authorship model: “there’s a lot to be won by allowing everyone to quickly do edits, but a more tightly controlled model may have benefits as well. And perhaps all those people complaining about Wikipedia – or who had Wikipedia articles they started be deleted, as Wikipedia does not allow all kinds of entries – will now consider Knol a potential new home for research and sharing.”
• A Slashdot commenter notes that there’s some appeal to Wikipedia’s anonymity: “Part of contributing to Wikipedia is that you’re anonymous… would you really want someone to know that despite being a huge football fan, you also knew about My Little Pony?”
• Wired has an in-depth piece which merits a thorough reading. I did like this quote from Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica: “it’s not the presence of Wikipedia that’s a problem, it’s the omnipresence of Wikipedia.”

I was compiling and sifting through reaction to the Knol launch from around the web, and noticed something weird. I searched Digg.com for front page stories about ‘knol’. No joy–the newest is 189 days old. It’s the same deal for stories involving Google–nothing on the Knol launch there.

It struck me as odd, that the tech news giant was, for all intents and purposes, ignoring the launch of Google Knol. There were a couple of submissions at around 60 to 65 Diggs, but not enough to hit the notorious front page.

Then I figured it out. I feel a little silly, actually, because I noticed this news earlier in the day:

3900 Diggs and counting. That’s big news in that community. There’s even a supplementary story that’s received over 2500 Diggs.

Of course, it’s not like there’s a click-scarcity on Digg. Diggers could push both Google-related stories to the front page, but for whatever reason, the, uh, sourced-crowd chose not too favour Knol. Maybe tomorrow?

UPDATE: Today, Digg finally pushed a knol story to the front page. Oddly, it’s from PhysOrg.com.

The big day is finally here, and Google has taken the wrappers off Google Knol. From the official announcement:

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

I’ll be writing a series of posts over the next few days checking out reactions to the launch and the project itself. My wife and I did put together a quick knol on social media marketing, as a first experiment with the platform.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Duncan Riley on TechCrunch:

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.