Write Great Google Knols

How crazy will people be about getting their hands on an invitation to become a Google Knol early adopter? As far as I can figure, that depends on two factors:

• Supply and demand: How quickly will Google open up the gates to let just anybody in? This is Google, after all, and not some startup with worries about bandwidth and storage costs. If I recall correctly, highly-restricted beta periods for previous products like Gmail or Docs and Spreadsheets have been brief.
• The value of knol-related SEO: This is hard to predict–I’m only an SEO acolyte. Presumably if you can create highly-ranked knols in your subject area, and then link back to your own content, that’s attracted. Simultaneously, you can make AdSense revenue from highly-ranked knols. Here’s the kicker though: how much will expertise matter? On the rest of the web, there’s definitely an ongoing battle between the most ‘popular’ page and the most ‘authoritative’ or ‘informative’ page. They are often not the same thing. Will knols be any different? I doubt it, but we’ll see.

Will we see knol invites up on eBay? We might, for a very short period of time. If Google sticks to its usual beta process, the number of knol users should grow sharply, quickly.

In truth, we don’t know much. Here are a few questions which immediately crossed my mind:

1. Once authors create pages, how will they become discovered in Google’s index? That is, will authors have to promote their pages and gather incoming links to achieve a high status for their article?
2. Will there be a dedicated ‘knol search’, like Google Blog Search? I think the answer is almost certainly yes.
3. How hard will it be to get a beta invite?
4. How will the Knol identity system integrate with the rest of the hodge podge that is Google’s ID system. I have far too many Google logins, and most of them don’t talk to each other.
5. Will authors be able to embed audio and video content in knols?
6. What will the authoring system look like? Will it have any relationship to Google Docs and Spreadsheets?
7. What will the revenue split be between Google and knol writers?
8. How will Google handle multiple competitive knols on the same topic? I assume the same way they handle competition between web pages on any topic, but do searchers really want to see multiple knol search results in the first couple of pages?
9. How will Knol compete with Mahalo, Squidoo and Wikipedia? For one thing, the revenue model sure beats Mahalo. I’d rather get a trickle of income over five years than $10 for writing an article. I know which one will add up to more money.
10. Imagine two knols on, say, evolutionary psychology. A global authority and eminent professor writes a knol on the topic, as does a SEO-savvy noob. The professor’s knol is way better, but the noob generates way more incoming links. How will Google handle this?
11. The sample knol has a Creative Commons license. How will that impact use and re-use of the article’s content?
12. Will authors be able to moderate reviews of their own page? That is, will they be able to only publish the positive ones? I doubt it.

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.

As you probably know if you’re reading this blog, Udi Manber, VP Engineering at Google announced an exciting and provocative new project today: Google Knols. I read about it on Robert Scoble’s blog and, being in an opportunistic mood, decided to start a blog about Google Knols. I know a lot about writing, and a fair bit about the web, so I figured I’d put two and two together and track the progress of Google’s latest enterprise.

So what do we know about knols thus far:

• “Knol” stands for ‘unit of knowledge’. I assume you pronounce it like “noll”, which seems better than the alternatives: “null” and “gnoll“.
• A knol is essentially an article authored by a specific and visible author and hosted on Google’s servers.
• In addition to the hosting, Google provides the writing and editing tools. Presumably they’re all web-based.
• Once they’re out of beta, anybody will be able to write a knol.
• There may be multiple knols on the same topic–”competition of ideas is a good thing”.
• Knols can contain ads at the discretion of the author. The author will receive a a “substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads”.

Udi Manber links to an image of a sample knol on insomnia, by one Rachel Manber (presumably they’re related?). We can see that it’s formatted much like a typical Wikipedia article, except for a few differences:

• There are peer reviews in the sidebar.
• There are comments and ‘Q & A’ threads at the bottom of the article.
• There are ’search terms’–keywords or tags–in the header section of the article.
• There’s a chunk of Google Ads in the sidebar.

That’s about all we’ve got at this stage. I need to go forth and read some reactions from around the blogosphere.