Google Knol: Monopolist claws
So, what kind of revolutionary technology is a tech company, web 2.0, deep-pocketed and with a headcount approaching 10 000 people, up to? Reinventing wikipedia, that is... Google announced knol.
What is revolutionary here? Nothing.
What is knol? A knol is one unit of knowledge. A webpage dealing with one specific subject. A Wikipedia-like entry:
What Google really means is: "Wikipedia evolved without a strong focus on the author". The target is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has been establishing itself as a regular high-ranker in Google results, and is an obvious target for an ad-oriented business, always hungry for web traffic. Even the focus on advertisement is obvious from the description.
What Google should have done, in order to "do no evil", was to get the search engine team to develop, interpret and properly support Microformats. Further, their strong position in the Wikipedia foundation would guarantee that an encyclopedia-like article microformat would be born with a large pool of content.
Microformat support, however, would not bring any additional revenue. Despite the "no evil" clause, Google is a profit-searching company. And it shows...
What is revolutionary here? Nothing.
What is knol? A knol is one unit of knowledge. A webpage dealing with one specific subject. A Wikipedia-like entry:
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.Unlike wikipedia, a knol is owned by an author who, while setting his reputation on the line, moderates the content. The justification is:
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.And it is false. The web is all about authors. There are about 100 million blog authors out there. All of them have a reputation to maintain. Many of those publish under their own domain. A significant group have enough reputation to live off blogging. Is Google stopping trying to "organize the world information" and moving to "own the world information"? Nah, I think the explanation is both simpler and less dark-overlord-like.
What Google really means is: "Wikipedia evolved without a strong focus on the author". The target is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has been establishing itself as a regular high-ranker in Google results, and is an obvious target for an ad-oriented business, always hungry for web traffic. Even the focus on advertisement is obvious from the description.
What Google should have done, in order to "do no evil", was to get the search engine team to develop, interpret and properly support Microformats. Further, their strong position in the Wikipedia foundation would guarantee that an encyclopedia-like article microformat would be born with a large pool of content.
Microformat support, however, would not bring any additional revenue. Despite the "no evil" clause, Google is a profit-searching company. And it shows...
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However, unlike Boyd, I don't feel at all comfortable with Knol's Google-owned model. More so when, as I wrote, Google could have taken the route of not owning any content and just let the distributed nature of the web add value. (Comment this)