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?
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.”
