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.