Posted on Wednesday, 23rd July 2008 by Launching Today
Name
What does it do?
Google warned us a few months ago that this will be launching a reference based website, and here it is. Knol is your basic run of the mill socially written reference website, however authors are responsible for their content. Unlike Wikipedia, one author writes the article, on a topic that they have an authority on. A medical doctor will write an article on medicine and be responsible for it - unlike Wikipedia where a 13 year old anonymous kid can edit the article based on some other article he read somewhere else. Other users can rate Knol articles as a form of quality control. Other users can edit or modify a page, but the original author must approve the changes.
What are they like?
Obviously there is Wikipedia, however I feel that this takes on the New York Times’ About.com - a collection of articles that are written by people in the know. This is very much a direct competitor to them and they should be a little concerned. The similarity is in that About.com pays their writers, and Google Knol lets authors add their own adsense code to their articles for a revenue share. Google has the ability to build a great community of fact checkers to build even more authority on articles, however the company haven’t ever been particularly good at building community websites. I would always trust the About.com article over a Knol one. There are also the smaller About.com competitors such as Suite101 and the rest.
What else should they do?
Google has more than enough users, so they should build up a decent amount of articles quickly. They just need to focus on the quality control through the community, so Knol can be viewed as the definitely correct version of Wikipedia. Try and get educators using it, because we all know that they dislike Wikipedia.
How they can fail
Everyone loves Wikipedia. Why write articles for Google? Wikipedia works pretty well and more people don’t care too much about authority. The site is also open to Squidoo type spam problems which would kill it. Can they control the spam? They sure can’t stop the blogspot spam. Knol is succeptable to people writing average at best articles and slapping their adsense code onto it. If they do that for 1000 articles they should have no trouble getting a decent amount of revenue - after all, it’s google so any article will get decent traffic. Google need to turn off articles that are below a certain rating, but that also can bring problems like sabotage. This is also the part where I have to mention that Knol is the worst name I can think of for a service like this.
Final word
I don’t see this taking off. Google have too many of these copycat websites which have all failed miserably with the exception of Gmail. There is no need for this website like there was a need for better web based email. Wikipedia and About.com work just fine.
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