2008/9/23 <WJhonson(a)aol.com>om>:
Knol is an online magazine -- multiple authors with
bylines (credit),
writing mostly individual articles *with some small input* and doing so to promote
their business or themselves. That's not the reason d'etre of an
encyclopedia.
The next step for Knol is probably going to be the creation of
sub-communities and cities built *on top of* the content. Some of us have already made
baby-steps in that direction with indexes, but what we really need is
categories and better userfication with projects and portals.
Knol is only a few months old, but already it seems like a much more Randian
approach to the underlying issue than Wikipedia. That is, each artist is
allowed to fully express their art-form in their own way, and the best art
rises to the top of the heap. That's the intent, it may not yet be the fact. It
may never be. We'll see.
I'm really not convinced it's a good approach at all to the question:
"what is useful to the reader?"
More pontifications:
http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2008/08/27/forget-the-writers/
- d.