I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to a bit of mainstream media coverage of the Google announcement. Here’s what the New York Times had to say:
Despite the existence of these services, as well as countless free tools for experts and ordinary people alike to share what they know online, Mr. Manber said Google thought many people who possessed useful knowledge did not publish it “because it is not easy enough to do that.”
Google declined to make Mr. Manber or anyone else available to discuss Knol, saying the project was an experiment that like many Google tests, might never be opened to the public.
Wow, “might never be opened to the public”, eh? That’d make this blog a big waste of time.
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.
