Googles Death ‘knol’
Googles Sounds the Death ‘knol’?
First, what is Knol?
Knol is a Squidoo/Wikipedia-like social media site brought to you by Google. Currently in beta, it is supposed to be a haven for authors to show off their writing skills and portfolios. Google introduced it to a select group of people in December of 2007. Here what Google had to say about it:
It is a “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. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
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. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.”
What effect will it have on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, and Wikipedia?
Since this is a Google project, you can expect a ton of money, advertising, and support once it is finally released. There are already sites out there trying to capitalize on Knol, such as knolstuff. There are also sites that appear to be trying to convince people to join their site instead, and knol isn’t even out yet. Hubpages asks visitors to not wait for Google Knol message; “Why wait for Google Knol? Write your own Wiki pages on HubPages and Earn.” I could see Knol cutting into the Hubpages and Squidoo potential users, as they do not have the name recognition, however Wikipedia is very well entrenched. I think there will be a lot of buzz on the internet, especially within the writer and blogger communities, but I do not believe it will kill most sites (that have an established community), unless they are not already fairly well known.
This is just one more step closer to Google taking over the web. They want a piece of the wiki pie, and they are taking it. Once it goes live I’m sure they with include this with basic searches on Google like they currently due with YouTube. This will severely cut into the search traffic for Wikipedia.
You know, I’ve heard of it, but for some reason it doesn’t seem very attractive. I guess the good thing about it is people are more likely to promote their page instead of usign their page to promote their site, like squidoo.
It will be interesting to see how it looks and what it’s functinality is like…
could be very interesting to see whether knol will take off successful
I try not to be anti-google, but with their vast access to the world’s information as well as control over which sites get exposure and which don’t… I can’t see their having a successful wikipedia-like site being a good thing.
Maybe I’m a little too paranoid for my own good.
I think this is an interesting move by Google..I can’t wait to see this being launched for the public soon..^^
I’m wondering why it takes them this long to launch the service. I can’t even find any beta users testing it.
http://gemzies.com is offering a nice alternative for waiting, waiting and waiting.
I do believe they are facing out of the news even before Knol is launched.
Remarkable situation to say the least.