Here comes Google’s Knol ‘edge’

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 15 December 2007 12:00

Opinion and Analysis

Knol pages can be commented on, ranked, shared with others and more, in the ways you expect these days through sites such as YouTube, which is in many ways similar to the Knol project, in that anyone can share their knowledge now, on video, through YouTube, if desired, with or without advertising, have it ranked, and shared with anyone.

No doubt Knol will allow content creators to include all the audio and video they want, too - at least all the video and audio that are allowed to be published if the copyright belongs to someone else.

An example would be if the knol in question is about a hit singer or top movie star, although given the way media companies are slowly embracing the Internet, a knol could just as easily be a distribution point for music and movies in full, along with text or anything else, especially as we move towards an IP delivered, always on, always available world.

There is already concern that Google becoming a content publisher with their own advertising system and ranking search engine now becomes a major competitor to every other publisher.

Google addresses this in their blog, where they say that:

“A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions".

The blog entry continues: "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. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing”.

Google say that they will rank knols according to the appropriateness of their information, saying in their blog that: “Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge”.

The project is currently in the beta stage, and is in a limited invitation program not open to the public. No doubt this will change in time, with beta participants able to invite others, as happens these days in beta programs, helping to generate extra buzz.

Google’s entry into any market probably sends more shivers up the spine of competitors these days than Microsoft’s entry into a market, but Wikipedia and the rest aren’t going anywhere – they’ll now start competing as hard as they can to stay relevant and grow in a Google dominated world.

The fire-wiki-works started long ago, Google’s entry simply signals yet another new phase in the information wars, with plenty more exciting developments yet to come, showing just how far the technological information revolution we're living through still has to go.