Knol is a project planned by Google, to spread knowledge, for user-generated articles on topics ranging from "scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions." It was announced on Dec 13, 2007. Knol pages are "meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read". The term knol, coined by Google to mean a "unit of knowledge", refers to both the project and an article in the project. The site has been seen by many as Google's attempt to compete with Wikipedia.
The site is currently in private Beta and requests to create "knols" are by invitation only.
The site is currently in private Beta and requests to create "knols" are by invitation only.
Each knol article will be written by a single author, and other users can edit it only with permission from the author. Readers may rate or comment on the articles. There can also be multiple articles for the same topic, each written by a different author. Google "[believes] that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content." Manber said that Google hopes "knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line" and that the authors will be able to decide whether advertisements will appear on their knols, and that if there are ads, a "substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads" will be given to authors. While it is not yet known if authors are allowed to run ads from companies other than Google, according to Sullivan, Manber said it is a possibility. Manber also writes that "Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors."
Since its announcement in December 2007, there has been speculation on Google's motives and its position as a producer of content rather than as an organizer. The Guardian's Jack Schofield argued that "Knol represents an attack on the media industry in general."
Knol has been described both as a rival to encyclopedia sites such as Wikipedia, Scholarpedia and About.com and as a complement to Wikipedia. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, welcomed the Google knol initiative saying that "The more good free content, the better for the world." While Wikipedia articles are written collectively under a "neutral point of view" policy, knol will highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and, like articles provided in Everything2 and Helium.com, knols will contain the personal opinions of the author.
Because of knol's format, some have said knol is more like About.com than Wikipedia. According to Wolfgang Hansson, a writer at DailyTech, knol may have been planned for About.com originally when it was up for acquisition. Hansson reported that several sources close to the sale said Google was planning to acquire About.com, but the executives at About.com learned Google was planning to move from About.com's model to a wiki-style model. That would have meant layoffs for all 500 or so "Guides" at About.com.
Some have debated whether Google search results can remain neutral because of possible conflict of interest. According to Danny Sullivan, an editor of Search Engine Land, "Google’s goal of making Knol pages easy to find on search engines could conflict with its need to remain unbiased." Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, raised similar concerns: "At the end of the day, there's a fundamental conflict between the business Google is in and its social goals. 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." As a response to such concerns it has been pointed out that Google already hosts large amounts of content in sites like YouTube, Blogger and Google Groups and that there is no significant difference in this case. Nicholas Carr, a frequent technology commentator, dismissed predictions of Google manipulating results saying that Google is hoping that the most popular knol pages will rise naturally through the search results, challenging Wikipedia and providing another area of content that can carry Google ads.
A different concern was raised by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia: That the profit incentive could turn Google's collection of knols into a magnet for pages about highly commercial subjects instead of more academic topics. Wales gave an example: "You may see an awful lot of articles about Viagra."
Knol has been described both as a rival to encyclopedia sites such as Wikipedia, Scholarpedia and About.com and as a complement to Wikipedia. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, welcomed the Google knol initiative saying that "The more good free content, the better for the world." While Wikipedia articles are written collectively under a "neutral point of view" policy, knol will highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and, like articles provided in Everything2 and Helium.com, knols will contain the personal opinions of the author.
Because of knol's format, some have said knol is more like About.com than Wikipedia. According to Wolfgang Hansson, a writer at DailyTech, knol may have been planned for About.com originally when it was up for acquisition. Hansson reported that several sources close to the sale said Google was planning to acquire About.com, but the executives at About.com learned Google was planning to move from About.com's model to a wiki-style model. That would have meant layoffs for all 500 or so "Guides" at About.com.
Some have debated whether Google search results can remain neutral because of possible conflict of interest. According to Danny Sullivan, an editor of Search Engine Land, "Google’s goal of making Knol pages easy to find on search engines could conflict with its need to remain unbiased." Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, raised similar concerns: "At the end of the day, there's a fundamental conflict between the business Google is in and its social goals. 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." As a response to such concerns it has been pointed out that Google already hosts large amounts of content in sites like YouTube, Blogger and Google Groups and that there is no significant difference in this case. Nicholas Carr, a frequent technology commentator, dismissed predictions of Google manipulating results saying that Google is hoping that the most popular knol pages will rise naturally through the search results, challenging Wikipedia and providing another area of content that can carry Google ads.
A different concern was raised by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia: That the profit incentive could turn Google's collection of knols into a magnet for pages about highly commercial subjects instead of more academic topics. Wales gave an example: "You may see an awful lot of articles about Viagra."
To see an example of knol format and knol description , please click the link below.
How to contribute for Knol? Please check the link below.
Google's Knol experiment to rival Wikipedia?
From what we know so far, Knol is a wiki-like platform. Authors can create topics, and there are tools to interlink articles and content, but as Manber says, an article, or "knol," is "just a Web page." Where it differs from a wiki is its focus on the author. All knols will highlight who wrote them.
That small difference becomes dramatic when you put Knol alongside Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a collaborative system. There is no author listed on a wiki page because a page may have many authors (if you want to, you can divine who said what on the history pages).
Since Knol pages will be authored, users won't, presumably, be able to dive in and edit another page. They'll be able to submit edits to the author for approval, though. So much for open collaboration. But as a platform for authors who might want to make some money from their work, it's a better bet (Knol will allow authors to monetize their pages as they see fit).
Purists may think that since Google is in the business of monetizing content via advertising, it should not compete with other publishing platforms. However, this is not the first time that Google has gotten into this business.
Blogger, of course, is Google's biggest success in text-publishing platforms. But Google also experimented with its own database, Google Base, in which it not only indexes the information but also stores it. And then there's YouTube.
I would compare Knol to Blogger, and eventually, I think it will have Digg-like elements. Knol is like Blogger because it's a personal publishing platform. It's all about giving authors a platform for writing. It's just a like a blog, but much more structured. If you like a Knoller, you'll likely want to read more written by that person, or even subscribe to his work.
It could become Digg-like, in that multiple Knol pages on the same topic will compete with each other. And while the Manber's post hinted that the arbiter of Knol quality will be Google search rankings, I cannot imagine that there won't, at some point, be both a social network of Knol users and a main page that ranks the most popular Knol pages by votes, page views, discussion flow, or other group metrics.
At this point, based only on the official blog post, Knol looks like a solid end-user publishing platform. I strongly doubt that it will put much of a hurt on Wikipedia, since its author focus makes it much the antithesis of the open, community-driven wiki model. Knol looks more like a Google version of About.com, Mahalo, or Squidoo.
Since Knol pages will be authored, users won't, presumably, be able to dive in and edit another page. They'll be able to submit edits to the author for approval, though. So much for open collaboration. But as a platform for authors who might want to make some money from their work, it's a better bet (Knol will allow authors to monetize their pages as they see fit).
Purists may think that since Google is in the business of monetizing content via advertising, it should not compete with other publishing platforms. However, this is not the first time that Google has gotten into this business.
Blogger, of course, is Google's biggest success in text-publishing platforms. But Google also experimented with its own database, Google Base, in which it not only indexes the information but also stores it. And then there's YouTube.
I would compare Knol to Blogger, and eventually, I think it will have Digg-like elements. Knol is like Blogger because it's a personal publishing platform. It's all about giving authors a platform for writing. It's just a like a blog, but much more structured. If you like a Knoller, you'll likely want to read more written by that person, or even subscribe to his work.
It could become Digg-like, in that multiple Knol pages on the same topic will compete with each other. And while the Manber's post hinted that the arbiter of Knol quality will be Google search rankings, I cannot imagine that there won't, at some point, be both a social network of Knol users and a main page that ranks the most popular Knol pages by votes, page views, discussion flow, or other group metrics.
At this point, based only on the official blog post, Knol looks like a solid end-user publishing platform. I strongly doubt that it will put much of a hurt on Wikipedia, since its author focus makes it much the antithesis of the open, community-driven wiki model. Knol looks more like a Google version of About.com, Mahalo, or Squidoo.
Another point of view is that Google's Units of Knowledge May Raise Conflict of Interest.
Google's rollout of an encyclopedia-like collection of articles could tighten the company's control over the user experience on the web.
Knol, an encyclopedia-like collection of articles written by selected experts, might drive revenue growth for Google, but that's probably not the motive behind it. The real value of the project is how it extends Google's control over the content that users see online.
"This is Google's way to grab the 'third page' of search," says Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. "The first page is the main page of a portal; the second page is where the search results are; the third page is what you click on when you decide where to go. Google already owns the first and second page, but since they don't own content, they have no control over the third page. In fact, a lot of times Yahoo-owned content could show up on the third page."
Knol is Google's invented term for a "unit of knowledge". Knol is expected to be a free, ad-supported publishing system. Google says it began soliciting articles from "a selected group of people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," and it's invite-only for the moment. Specific financial details were not disclosed, but Google says some knols may include ads, at the writer's discretion. "If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads," the company said.
Google is clearly playing catch-up to both Wikipedia (regularly ranked one of the top 10 visited properties online) and Yahoo (which has a fairly extensive collection of original content) through Knol. Knol could be a more attractive alternative to Wikipedia because of the financial incentive offered to contributors. By contrast, the only real incentive for Wikipedia editors is that they get the last word on a subject -- at least until the next edit.
It would be silly to bet against Google, but it's worth pointing out that Microsoft also had ambitions to launch a web-based encyclopedia -- in the 1990s, Microsoft bought rights to Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Collier's Encyclopedia and New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia, and launched a digital encyclopedia called Encarta. The highly-promoted series, which was available on CD-ROM or by subscription, isn't a huge cash cow for the company.
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."
Knol, an encyclopedia-like collection of articles written by selected experts, might drive revenue growth for Google, but that's probably not the motive behind it. The real value of the project is how it extends Google's control over the content that users see online.
"This is Google's way to grab the 'third page' of search," says Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. "The first page is the main page of a portal; the second page is where the search results are; the third page is what you click on when you decide where to go. Google already owns the first and second page, but since they don't own content, they have no control over the third page. In fact, a lot of times Yahoo-owned content could show up on the third page."
Knol is Google's invented term for a "unit of knowledge". Knol is expected to be a free, ad-supported publishing system. Google says it began soliciting articles from "a selected group of people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," and it's invite-only for the moment. Specific financial details were not disclosed, but Google says some knols may include ads, at the writer's discretion. "If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads," the company said.
Google is clearly playing catch-up to both Wikipedia (regularly ranked one of the top 10 visited properties online) and Yahoo (which has a fairly extensive collection of original content) through Knol. Knol could be a more attractive alternative to Wikipedia because of the financial incentive offered to contributors. By contrast, the only real incentive for Wikipedia editors is that they get the last word on a subject -- at least until the next edit.
It would be silly to bet against Google, but it's worth pointing out that Microsoft also had ambitions to launch a web-based encyclopedia -- in the 1990s, Microsoft bought rights to Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Collier's Encyclopedia and New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia, and launched a digital encyclopedia called Encarta. The highly-promoted series, which was available on CD-ROM or by subscription, isn't a huge cash cow for the company.
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."
Google is implicitly claiming that author's authority is a trusted system since “books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors.” In other words, knowing the source allows you to make judgments about its quality.
While I won’t dispute that claim, knowing something of the author is only part of why we trust books and other “authoritative sources.” There’s another very key element also common to books, news items, and scientific articles that's missing in knols — they have trained editors.
And part of the job of a skilled editor is to double check an author’s assertions and verify facts to ensure they are correct and that’s an essential element of building an author’s authority.
After all, without a strong background in theoretical physics, how are we to know that the latest book on the subject is authoritative or not? The answer is that we implicitly trust the system that vets and verifies an author’s claims and editors are a key part of that equation whether we’re explicitly conscious of it or not.
Without that system of trust knols may still have value — only time will tell — but it isn’t likely to spell doom for Wikipedia.
While I won’t dispute that claim, knowing something of the author is only part of why we trust books and other “authoritative sources.” There’s another very key element also common to books, news items, and scientific articles that's missing in knols — they have trained editors.
And part of the job of a skilled editor is to double check an author’s assertions and verify facts to ensure they are correct and that’s an essential element of building an author’s authority.
After all, without a strong background in theoretical physics, how are we to know that the latest book on the subject is authoritative or not? The answer is that we implicitly trust the system that vets and verifies an author’s claims and editors are a key part of that equation whether we’re explicitly conscious of it or not.
Without that system of trust knols may still have value — only time will tell — but it isn’t likely to spell doom for Wikipedia.
