Hi,
The only risk is censorship at search engine level. If Google starts putting
Knol entries higher in its searches an important percent of our traffic
moves to Knol.
Yet it's a risky move for Google itself. Knol is basically a Wikia, and
wikia, while being a successful site, is well beyond wikipedia as public
image, in terms of content credibility.
If Google starts to serve less authoritative content, it won't be long
before people starts to use another engine, that surely will not positively
bias knol content, but will rather do the opposite in order to exploit this
weakness in Google's offer.
Many people start their searches "directly" from en.wiki already. So in the
end Knol (while seemingly a powerful attack to our borders) may end up in
delivering us a powerful share of Google's traffic.
I will be much more impressed the day Google tunnels OUR existing pages; it
gives prominence to the tunneled version and pastes ads on them. That would
do the trick, if their servers were quicker than ours and they could offer
added services (say an integrated autosearch on YouTube, semantic searches,
plus this, that and that... some of their tools already go in that direction
and are far more dangerous than Knol). Screens are getting larger and larger
and so is bandwidth, there is room on them to deliver more content offer.
When it's not US doing it, somebody else will.
Yet as long as knol needs to fill in a 2 million pages startup gap based on
nothing more than "earn 5 dollars a year by writing on your fav subject"...
no, no need to worry. I'm copying it from citizendium's home page as I
write: "We have added over 4,200 articles (and many subpages) since November
2006". Say Knol may do 100 times better in quantity by delivering worst
quality. So what?
They ain't going nowhere... one thing is taking possession of a desert and
apparently worthless market niche, as the WMF did, another is making your
way thru an hyper saturated market. Google IS big, it has lots of control,
but it doesn't have enough control on the market for them to take over like
this. They need a better idea if they want to kick us out.
Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ronald Chmara
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 2:22 AM
To: fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net; wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Knol
On Dec 14, 2007, at 5:51 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
Not only can
adverts be purchased next to the results for these topics, but if
Google
is the number one result, which they will be (they emphasize in
the blog
post that "we are quite experienced with ranking web pages"), they
also
get to show advertisements next to the result that is clicked on
in the
event that the advertisement shown next to that result is not clicked
on. This is an increase in impressions, and the larger the number of
impressions, the greater the chance that one of them will be
converted.
Even better for Google is when a surfer clicks an advertisement in a
Knol article which lands them on a page displaying Google ads,
which....
you see where this is going...:)
That's what happens when you leave 10 billion
dollars laying on the
table.
Someone will pick it up. And, in our case, everyone will. However,
those
who have picked up may also give back.
So, Google knol is somewhat like wikipedia, with each new "revision"
of an article having advertisements customized for that revision?
I can't wait to see how their "herbal viagra" knol cluster turns out,
or which version of the "George W. Bush" knol gets the highest
rank... somehow, I don't see this ending well, without major changes.
Without clear guidelines, group ownership of "a good knol", and smart-
mob rule (as with wikipedia), it seems like a one-way ticket into
becoming, well, a morass of plagiarism accusations, highly biased
articles in competition with each other, and rampant abuse.
For us (and by "us", I mean the folks who have watched and worked in
similar projects over the years), I suspect watching knol will be an
experience not unlike watching one's own child learn to become a parent.
{{citation needed}} pretty much says it all.
-Bop
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