I predict that good contributors will remain with Wikipedia, and Google Knol will become saturated with mediocre content. Quality-driven contributors would then avoid Knol in order to protect their integrity.

Knol could compete with suite101.com and helium.com, though.

Let’s say knol existed then.

I’d prefer not to have sifted through 150 knols on the topic of yoga, all published by anyone and everyone who could plagiarize or copy/paste free content in hopes of getting some AdSense dollars.

“But the best one’s will sift to the top!”

How? By me going through the first 75?

Let me explain some simple rules of advertising:

- Good content attracts a crowd
- Ads works when the content is good because the crowd is big.
- The only to ensure good content is to control who can create it.

This model works:
TV – good shows, more ad revenue. Bad shows, no revenue
Google – good search results, more ad revenue. Bad, none
Wikipedia – good search results = potentially big revenue
YouTube – random content, hard to monetize
Knol – too much unfiltered content, hard to monetize

Will Google, indeed, have second thoughts about actually launching Google Knol? Or, is there a compelling need for the new service?…

Not that simply. They can do this only if they republish under the same terms that the Wikipedia content is licensed under, which is the GNU Free Documentation license:

http://wikipedi...edia:Copyrights
http://www.gnu....censes/fdl.html

In Creative Commons terminology, its a BY-SA license – i.e. attribution (credit the original authors whose Wikipedia article you used, which doesn’t fit very well with the trusted single author by-line approach of Knol) and share-alike (so you have to license derivative works under the same terms.) Will Knol even accept content licensed this way?

The two licenses (Gnu FDL and CC BY-SA) are sufficiently similar that an initiative to enable compatibility between the two licenses is reaching its final stages.

Having your content re-written all over the web DOES happen all the time…but how responsive is Google going to be to cease and desists? That’s a big question mark for me.

I think I read this in one of the comments on an earlier TC Knol story, but I expect to see a ton of Knol’s in high-paying niches and relatively few in interesting but hard-to-monetize areas. For people who are really interested in that, why wouldn’t they head over to Wikipedia for their info?

I dunno, I’m just skeptical of how much incentive there’s really going to be for someone like my hypothetical soup can label guy (who seems like the idea contributor) to get involved.

My take is that Knol owners have the copyright on their page, so it’s not commons based information.

So, if somebody has copy pasted the page, there has to be a take-down request feature for the copied information.

If it’s just paraphrased and rewritten information with no copyright violation, that already happens throughout the web.

As for encouraging others to vote through “voting exchanges”, I see that as one potential pitfall for this project, and one that Google should really pay close attention to.

Any site that allows these voting rings to form should be taken off Google, for example, for good, and the violating authors banned.

BUT the GUI is in my opinion really poor. It is not intuitive – The screens are terribly cluttered – you cannot see at a glance which button to click to perform an action or navigate elsewhere, and this is counter to so much WEB 2.0 start-up design, which is if nothing else focuses on the needs of the “idiot user” – applications should be easy to follow and navigate around.

Gmail looks as if it has been cobbled together and the cobbling appears to continue.

For example if I am in the middle of composing an e-mail and I decide I want to search my address book to copy someone else, I have to either abandon my e-mail or put it into draft … as far as I can see. If I am reading an e-mail and want to reply the reply button is tucked away far down the screen – it is not highlighted or obvious.

Whereas I really like the Picasa GUI and Notebook has recently got better although at the start it was IMHO poor GUI, but a useful (for me)application.

This seems to sum up a laissez-faire attitude to design by Google that “permeates” many of their products. Get it out fast -design it later with user input – in long term Betas.

I suspect Knol will be much the same.

fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

People are not going to do charity work for a for-profit company.

I’m with John, gmail has a certain “Emperor’s New Clothes” to it as far as I’m concerned. It’s *OK*, but it’s not the mail client of all mail clients.

You might consider it groupthink, but people are flocking to Gmail because it has the best spam filter out there, hands down. There are a lot of features (as far as web-based mail goes) such as this, that other clients can’t even come close to. I just think it’s absurd to say that it’s a poorly designed product. I guess everyone is entitled to their own opinion…

Wikipedia will then die a quick death.

Not necessarily incredibly dumb… at least it rhymes with know, while could also mean KNowledge OnLine (if not just simply Knowledge, as you knol) in addition to its being suggested by Google as a noun meaning “a unit of knowledge”…

But in any case, nothing has been as incredibly dumb as… Orkut… as a servicename for a wanting-to-be-big social network.. imagine what if google.com (or googol.com as the founders alledgedly originally wanted) was named sergey.com or larry.com instead (which still easier than, what, orkut??!)