http://twitter.com/dekhome

Sadly, this is true.

Alternatives are welcome and NEEDED.

It is surprising that many bloggers have not yet used knol even though for some of their articles knol is more appropriate platform.

In due course of time many bloggers will use knol also for writing. I noticed knol from blogger dash board only and started writing on knol. I get relatively good number of page views on knol compared to my blogs. And on knol I have some advantages as a faculty member as I am able to make for each knol separate coauthors and hence able to develop online assignments for my students.

But there are committed persons already putting in efforts. And more experts will register in the coming days. As knol is a technical platform, there is no reason for google feeling ashamed of providing a platform to experts to write on. They can feel proud that they are investing because they feel such an opportunity will prove useful to the society in the long run. Even if it takes some more time for more reputed institute professors, scientists and consultants to write on knol, many of us have to advocate google to invest in the platform.

Wikipedia focused on creating individual and unique pages about everything in a massive heirarchy that are subject to changes by anyone who cares. Their crowdsourcing model requires many compulsive “experts” in pure egoless collaboration mode. Additionally the broader site requires heavy moderation to prevent people looking to game the system from being successful. It’s also noteworthy that having canonical items dramatically simplifies site search for Wikipedia.

When considering Knol’s approach, it seems based on the fact that Google is not subject to the same limitations when it comes to search. Additionally, trying to lure committed Wikipedia users over to a redundant service is a slow, and unproven process. So, Google Knol adds a bit of ownership over both the entry and how it gets edited and likely expects the cream to rise to the top eventually. This creates more of a small-picture payoff for individual contributors, which may prove out to be more attractive to a broader user-base. (An additional, narcissistic note: contrary to the terms of service on Wikipedia, it looks like there’s no rule against creating one about oneself.) Eventually if google continues to resource it, I think Knol could be a powerful opinion-centric alternative to Wikipedia’s encyclopedic approach, and ultimately the two will complement each other.

One complaint: i did a quick search in Knol and the results seem to sort exclusively based on most recently edited knols (completely ignoring quality of content or user ratings). This is a failure that they should probably address. Can’t Knol afford google sitesearch?

http://www.prog...ing-google-knol

http://en.wikip.../Sense_of_humor