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 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.
