1/11/2008
Unlocking the Google Knol Tool
In early December Google soft-announced that they are currently working on new free tool they are calling “knol” which stands for “unit of knowledge”. Udi Manber, VP Engineering at Google had this to say about the tool in his post entitled “Encouraging People to Contribute Knowledge“
The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.
Here is a sample of a Knol entry that talks about Insomnia.
PC World tried to dissect some of the details on the Knol project in Google takes a Crack at Wikipedia
Google is gunning for Wikipedia with a new service called Knol that aims to capitalize on the growing popularity of social encyclopedias. The Google Knol (defined as a “unit of knowledge”) project is in closed trials right now with no word on when it will be open to the public to try.
According to a recent blog posting about the Knol project by Google we know a bit about what to expect. From what I can tell Knol shares a lot of the same traits as the pre-existing types of social reference pages such as Wikipedia, Squidoo, and Mahalo. As with these other services Knol users have the ability to create a page on any topic with information, pictures, links and more. It’s in the details where Google is looking to one-up the competition and justify its existence
Google’s primary focus on Knol will be with the authorship of each page. The original creator of each page will have a miniature profile on the page and will be given a wide variety of options to control the page.
One significant difference between Knol and competing services is that authors will be given the option to place Google ads on the pages they manage and receive revenue from those ads.
As people are slowly learning more about this tool – more and more are giving their opinions on how this affects the Wikipedia dynamic. Betsy Schiffman of Wired magazine’s”Google’s Units of Knowledge May Raise Conflict of Interest“, says:
The Knol project will also do little to ease critics’ concerns that Google already plays too dominant a role in how people access information online. Google owns the search market (with a 69 percent market share in November), and with the flip of a switch (or a slight alteration to its search algorithm), it can direct people to, or away from, any given site. Google says it will rank knols “appropriately” so that their relative worth will be reflected in search results. To some extent, though, it raises the question of whether Google can rank competitors objectively given that the search company may have a financial incentive to keep Google-owned content at the top of its search results.
“At the end of the day, there’s a fundamental conflict between the business Google is in and its social goals,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “What you’re seeing here, slowly, is Google embracing an advertising-driven model, in which money will have a greater impact on what people have ready access to.”
Jason Goldman who used to work at Goldman and now works for Twitter has this say about the Knol from his post Argumentum ad Verecundiam-
On the first point, a big reason this is happening is because of the amount of unmonetizable traffic Google sends to Wikipedia. Guess what the “I’m feeling Lucky” hit is for the title of this post. And Wikipedia won’t accept advertising. Let’s build Knol.
The further justification for Knol is “Who can trust all that crap on Wikipeda?” Google is fundamentally an academic institution and part of that ethos is that things aren’t really “good” unless peer reviewed. The concept of peer review is central to how work is done inside Google and that basically works as far as it goes. Unfortunately, that ethos has extended to the way Google views content on the web. Sergey once asked the Blogger team how Blogger was going to compete with the New York Times. Even though our pageviews exceeded those of the NYT, the point I think he was making was “When are you gonna produce something authoritative that lots of people will accept as good.” Blogger’s answer was “Huh?” Knol’s answer is peer review.
So far access to Knol is by invitation only and it looks like things are still in the works at Google, till we know more, it still remains to be seen what the future really holds for Google’s Knol tool.
