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.
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.
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.
