Today Google announced the release of their long anticpated platform called “Knol.” Knol is Google’s reponse to Wikipedia and is designed to be a type of “expert” wiki, think about.com. Knol has actually been dubed my many as the “Wikpedia killer,” only time will tell.
Knol allows the authors to embed adsense in their postings in hopes of generating some sort of revenue. Not a bad idea, but as Adam Ostrow pointed out, Squidoo does the exact same thing.
Per the Google Blog:
“The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.
With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, 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. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!”
Now Google is saying that the focus of Knol is on authorship which is great, but let’s be honest here, when you end up with twenty Knol’s on the same subject, which undoubtedly will say different things, won’t folks get a little confused? What I like about the Wikipedia model is that all of the information is centralized in one location. It seems that Knol is actually decentralizing the information and while this may boad well for a community affect, I’m not so sure how effective it wille be from an information gathering standpoint.
Knol has been writted about extensively today, so if you would like more information I highly recommend the write up from Read Write Web and of course, the official Google Blog
What do you think about the Knol model or Knol in general?
Thanks for reading
Comments