Write Great Google Knols

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.

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?