Write Great Google Knols

If you’re launching a web project in 2008, I think RSS should be as essential a feature as, say, broad browser compatibility. This is ten-fold true if you’re launching a community-oriented information database like Google Knol. And yet they seem to have launched without any RSS support.

Wikipedia has had RSS since mid-2006. They more recently added the much sought after watchlist feed, so that editors could monitor changes to articles they work on.

As far as I can tell, there are no RSS feeds in Knol. A few I’d like to see include:

• A firehose feed of all new articles.
• A revisions feed for every article, like Wikipedia.
• A feed for changes to my knols only.
• A feed for comments on my knols.

I’m sure there are a lot of other ways one might slice the data ouput of Knol. And, in truth, I’m sure it’s a feature in the plans for future iterations of Google’s service. It is a little shocking that it didn’t get baked into version 1.0, though.

Web luminary and Wikipedia contributor Tim Bray weighs in on Knol and how they might compare to the world’s biggest encyclopedia:

Yeah, it’s a problem that being a Wikipedia editor is a less-lightweight activity than it used to be. But it’s not fatal. Being a gamer is less-lightweight too, and Warcraft draws millions. The fact that I can’t contribute as easily as I used to irritates me, but at the end of the day Wikipedia doesn’t really need me, it seems.

Udi’s one of the Really Smart Guys and Knol is a genuinely new approach. But I don’t think that there’s a really big problem that will drive people toward it.

On a related note, John Batelle elicited a quote from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales:

We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Very different from a wiki, and not likely to generate much of quality.

Maybe I ought to run a survey about predicting the long term effects of Google Knol entering the content creation market place?

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.

For a Friday two weeks before Christmas, the web is sure abuzz about Google’s decloaking of their new project. As Techmeme indicates, pretty much everybody who’s anybody in the Web 2.0 space has contributed his or (occasionally) her two cents on the revelation. I perused some of the tech luminaries blogs, and these were the most interesting comments I found.

From the chapeau’d Om Malik:

Which is to say that they won’t start making knols appear higher in the search results. Maybe it is the jet lag, but I don’t see knols as revolutionary as others are making them out to be. After all, you can set up a blog, make an expert page, maintain it and even put Google Ad Sense to monetize it. So how does this make knols special?

From Nick Carr:

The success of Knol is, of course, far from assured, but the ability of authors to sign their names, take ownership of their work, and compete with other authors may well be a lure for many people…For the past year, Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales has been doing a lot of trash-talking about taking on Google in the search business. Now Google’s striking back.

Duncan Riley on TechCrunch:

Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere, but having said that they do rely on Google for a good portion of their traffic. If Wikipedia is replaced in the first few results on Google with pages from Knol, Wikipedia traffic will decrease, and possibly as a consequence so will broader participation on Wikipedia.

From Philipp Lennsen, on the world’s most popular non-Google blog on Google:

Then again, Knol seems to want to offer incentive for experts in terms of recognition, and money as well, two aspects lacking in Wikipedia. Also, if projects like Wikipedia get some good large-scale competition, it might help Wikipedia too. At this time, Wikipedia’s editing tools for instance are somewhat cluttered and don’t have the best usability.

Finally, my fellow Canadian Matthew Ingram:

I think this could be huge. A more authoritative version of Wikipedia, compiled by experts and powered by Google? Not only that, but as Paul Kedrosky points out, the pages come with Google ads, and authors get a revenue share — he says (and I agree) that it could hurt not just Wikipedia but Mahalo and plenty of others, especially if those pages start to rank highly in Google searches.