July 30 2008 / by jheylin
Category: The Web Year: General Rating: 6 Hot
The internet community is abuzz with the latest Google gossip.
No, not the prediction that they’ll make their Gmail storage space
unlimited for their upcoming anniversary. And no, not
Cuil, the latest
search engine designed by former Google employees which professes
to kill Google (so far, all they’ve managed to do is crash their
server over and over). The real news is the release of Google Knol, a social
media site that will possibly siphon large amounts of traffic away
from information powerhouse Wikipedia. 
Knol is, much like Wikipedia, a place on the Internet to share
information for free in article form. The key difference is that
whereas Wikipedia has articles written and edited by anyone who
visits the site, Knol has articles written by industry
professionals. In the words of Cedric Dupont on the
Google Blog, “Knols are authoritative articles about specific
topics, written by people who know about those subjects.” In other
words, an article about hearts is written by a cardiologist, not
the mass public. Although still in Beta testing, Knol has already
published hundreds of articles from astronomers, doctors, chefs,
professors, and even linguists. Google is even trying to coin the
word knol into Internet vocabulary, defining it as a “unit of
knowledge”.
Another interesting feature of Knol is that authors are allowed,
and indeed encouraged, to claim their writing as their own legal
property. Furthermore, this means these authors can choose to
receive revenue from their content by placing Google ads on the
articles’ landing page. Google writes “If an author chooses to
include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share
from the proceeds of those ad placements.” An interesting incentive
for writers, but so far most of the articles have no ads. Possibly
in keeping with the freedom of Wikipedia, most authors might not
want their work tainted by gross auto-generated ads.
Building on the claim of sole authorship, writers can also
choose to allow moderated changes to their submissions if they so
want. “Any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the
author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these
contributions become visible to the public.” One of the major
criticisms of Wikipedia is the fact that anonymous users can alter
any article no matter what their expertise – groups have even been
caught altering political articles in order to show a person or
cause in a more favorable light. At Knol, the author of the piece
has the option of accepting or denying the changes, thereby
maintaining information quality and accuracy.
Wikipedia may not be perfect, but in reality it’s still an
incredibly valuable tool (not to mention it’s the seventh
most-visited site in the world). For all its flaws, it still gets
the job done and gets it done well. Knol may try to take a huge
bite of the Wikipedia traffic (some are fearing Google might tweak
their search engine to display Knol over Wikipedia in searches),
but in the meantime it will probably just nibble a bit. And as for
the upcoming years? We’ll just have to see if quality and trust
will make an impact on people’s choices. But hey, even the
Encyclopedia Britannica has errors.
Image: Mark Kelley (Flickr,CC-Attribution)
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