Comments on: Google Preparing To Launch Game Changing Wikipedia Meets Squidoo Project

By: Why I Think Google Will Offer Free Hosting : The G Spot

Why I Think Google Will Offer Free Hosting : The G Spot — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:17:54 +0000

[…] ad inventory Wikipedia is great, but stubbornly refuses to run Adsense. Enter Google Knol. Google Ad Manager helps here, too. But Adwords is not limited to the web. You can now use the […]

By: PC Revenge

PC Revenge — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:12:22 +0000

[…] Google Preparing To Launch Game Changing Wikipedia Meets Squidoo Project […]

By: T-Error

T-Error — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:16:42 +0000

Lol of the day: Google’s Domainers and Knol.com…

Mid december 2007 Google announced its Wikipedia competitor “Knol” (what a name…). My guess is that it will be a huge “success” like Google Checkout (lesson: bad idea to come up with an alternative to a monopoly — e…

By: HD BizBlog- The Blog: Productivity in Context » Blog Archive » Personally, I welcome our Knol overlords.

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:43:45 +0000

[…] Personally, I am not sure how much people will like the idea of web pages that anyone can edit. It’s one thing for wikipedia, which is supposed to be an information resource, it’s quite another for your homepage. Inevitably these pages are going to get punked, as people go in and add links to their own blogs and websites. Or simply vandalized, the way that Wikipedia is nearly every day (check out these edits compiled by Wired). Over at TechCrunch there is a lively disussion, featuring a great deal of cynicism mixed with trepidation about what is coming next, in the Comments to this post. […]

By: armygames

armygames — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:11:01 +0000

In addition to the U.S Army All-American Bowl, Sportslink Inc., the sports marketing company managing the U.S Army All-American Bowl also conducts high school sports like the U.S Army All-American base ball games which feature the top high school prospects of the country.

By: Knol

Knol — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 17:58:28 +0000

knol…

We want to be the first resource center for Google Knol.
And what is a knol? Just a new web page format from Google, where authors will be able to write articles, and share advertising revenue.
For more information see:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2…

By: SticKer

SticKer — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 06:59:45 +0000

It wont be long before Google’s Knol (GPedia) will be competiting with Wikipedia.

SticKer

Webmaster Forum | Webmaster Blog

By: Mike (San Jose)

Mike (San Jose) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 14:06:58 +0000

Knol is a code name (i.e. see “Longhorn” and Windows Vista).

The official name of the service is going to be GPedia (like Gmail), short for GooglePedia.com.

–
Mike

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 08:59:50 +0000

I once thought Google was a respectable company but this past few years all they have been doing is buying out companies and now there trying to ripoff from Wikipedia’s success.

By: Faramarz

Faramarz — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:06:50 +0000

Oddly enough, i was watching Seth Godin’s marketing lecture at Googleplex earlier today and he touches this very subject, with a quick plugin of his own service . (Seth founded Squidoo)

looks like they took his motivation to heart and are about ready to demolish him.

By: DavidEzra

DavidEzra — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:25:06 +0000

“The advantace of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources - labor, capital and human ingenuity - in a manor that can’t be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner.” Freidrich von Hayek

In my mind, what it boils down to is this - who trumps who?

The free market … or a brilliant central planner / author!

Who will the masses look to as the both the most authoritative and - perhaps most important - the most objective source?

A number of people editing the same article would seem to lend to credibility for being perceived as being “unbiased” … as opposed to a single individual - who, although knowledgeable - is still beholden to certain opinions and views.

(Moreover, both are dependent on “contributers.” In my mind, the one that wins will be the one that has the superior content, which is a function of being able to attract the most numerous - and qualified - authors. If Google is perceived as being “evil” - this will definitely hurt them on a strategic front.)

By: stephen

stephen — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:50:13 +0000

the monetary incentive and author central mentality will damp the community spirit. i’m sure there will be some decent aspects, but there will be significant splintering of contributors with people trying to carve up the topic space for $$ => hello unstructured, noisy, redundant pseudo authoritative barf spamathelioma. definitely not a wikipedia killer like the later posts have pointed out… more like a mahalo killer, but thats not saying much…its like having mike tyson fight a dying bunny. hopefully they won’t resort to heavily “tweaking” wikipedia pages down in their SERPs in favor of these pages.

By: Victor Lai

Victor Lai — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:08:37 +0000

In response to Jonathan (10):
Why does a company need to invent something completely new to receive everyone’s approval? The reason Google got so big is because people like you and I USE their services everyday - they’re better than the competition. When they were starting out, these boards were full of Google-love, now they’ve get compared to Microsoft whenever they release a new product. Let the gov’t deal with antitrust issues. Advertising allows for free services - that is the future and Google is embracing it.

If they can do it better, isn’t that better for everyone?

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:39:01 +0000

The sucess of Knol will depend on how accurate the information is vs. Wikipedia and I don’t see how anyone will trust Knol over Wikipedia.

By: Karl Engblom

Karl Engblom — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:59:57 +0000

Why not let Google give it a try? Wikipedia certainly has its shortcomings:
1. The lack of recognition for contributors. Right now, the major form of recognition is the opportunity to have your work in the Wikipedia entry’s list of references. Your actual contribution is anonymous,and the smartest people are usually too busy to contribute to something without getting credit for it.

2. People messing around with articles. No comment necessary.

3. Outdated statistics. Updating statistics is boring compared to writing articles, so there are plenty of outdated statistics on Wikipedia. Finding statistics from original sources is daunting –noone has ever found what he’s looking for on a US government website, for example. Here’s a challenge for Google: why not persuade the original sources to provide you with direct, easy-to-digest statistics feeds? Then, whenever you are looking for a fact, you won’t get something that an unknown person cut-and-pasted from an unknown source at an unknown point in time, but the actual figures, straight from the responsible entity.

If Google solves these issues, Wikipedia has some serious competition.

By: gr

gr — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:58:46 +0000

Now, there is a conflict of interest between goog and the rest of the web. Goog can potentially clone the web (under the pretense of independently authored Knols) and own it all — embrace and extend.

By: Frank Stallone

Frank Stallone — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:38:42 +0000

A killer idea for 4 or 5 years ago. I don’t think this will fly. I don’t think top quality content will come in sufficient numbers. That is crucial. A minor success at best.

By: techcrunchreader

techcrunchreader — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:10:08 +0000

Good post Duncan.

I think it’s a good idea. Some people writting wikis for Wikipedia are often upset because “their” page or article is altered by someone.

This project looks more like a Squidoo lens then a Wikipedia wiki.

Also, if they share revenue, the users are not working for free so it encourages more contribution and competition.

By: Saurabh Kaushik

Saurabh Kaushik — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:45:59 +0000

Knol is Wikipedia by Google. But it has better features for author to monetize written page, related search box and Peer review widget.

I think it is great to have a better version of wikipedia and I am sure Google will do greater job in this area.

I would certainly not advocate the monopoly, but you got to be smarter and quicker to kill the beast, otherwise the story repeat itself.

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:22:21 +0000

Wikipedia (50M+ uniques) tends to be result #2 or #3 for A LOT of Google search results, it makes sense for Google to want to keep some of those people within the Google ecosystem.

By: Tom Nixon

Tom Nixon — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:19:59 +0000

It’s already been shown that Wikipedia entries have more factual innacuracies than Encyclopedia Britannia articles. This is in spite of the community editorial process in Wikipedia. Obviously the advantage of Wikipedia is the breadth and depth of knowledge and the fact it can be kept up-to-date.
With no editorial at all on Knol (just the passive acts of rating and commenting), and no guarantees that the author will keep the page up-to-date; correct errors; or clear up any issues of bias, it’s likely to be overall less useful content in my opinion.
Authors who truly want to add to the world’s body of knowledge have the perfect opportunity to do this in wikipedia. What does Knol really add other than a revenue opportunity, and will this be such a big motivator for authors?

By: maximilian

maximilian — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:27:29 +0000

I feel most people have missed the point that a knol is not like a wikipedia entry. It is written by _one_ author, not collaboratively. A knol is more like a blog post, in that sense (with comments).

By: Philipp Lenssen

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:05:30 +0000

> The demo page doesn’t have a lot of outbound
> links at all (say like Squidoo) so although it’s
> possible it could be gamed, I’m thinking that
> those possibilities may be limited (although again:
> given they’re not editing it I’m not sure how).

There’s stillt he “nofollow” attribute for links, which Google could add to any link automatically and still say they don’t edit it.

By: Philipp Lenssen

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:03:43 +0000

> they should start the knol by defining innovation…so that
> they can remeber who the once were: open social, android,
> digg search results, etc etc….all “me too” products.

Google web search itself in 1998 was also a “me too” product. Altavista for instance was around doing the exact same thing — only much, much worse, which turns out to be whole difference. But I agree with your point about how the announcement post by Google is kind of pointing in the direction of Wikipedia with strangely enough never mentioning Wikipedia.

By: BlackVivi

BlackVivi — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:22:32 +0000

Google should acquire a wiki based news site instead, like http://www.cjreport.com
We have wikipedia, we don’t need another one.