[Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Robert Rohde<rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some weeks ago I had an opportunity to talk with a Google employee
> about a number of topics.  One of the things we discussed was Knol.
>
> Setting aside the way it may have been marketed in the popular press
> at the time, she suggested that Google does not currently see Knol as
> a collaborative medium in the way Wikipedia is.  Rather, they
> currently regard Knol as more of a web publishing platform.  In other
> words, it is a place for individuals and small groups to post their
> work online with a certain degree of infrastructure and visibility
> (and Google ads, of course).
>
> Whether Knol has distinguished itself from other ways of publishing
> online, I don't know, though I haven't seen much evidence of that.
> However, she also made the more interesting point that most of
> Google's current development efforts with Knol are focused towards
> foreign languages and scripts.  By providing a high level of UTF-8
> support, they seem to be hoping that they can capture a significant
> portion of the non-English web publishing community, which is of
> course a rapidly growing segment that isn't always well supported by
> some current offerings.
>
> Rather than being the next Wikipedia, maybe a better analogy would be
> to think of Knol as the next Geocities.

Hm. Google Sites is much better platform for web publishing. But, it
is not so new to see that Google has internal project competition (cf.
Google Notebook and Google Docs, for example). While it may be good in
the sense of diversification, I think that they could do much better
with integrating features of different projects. For example, public
comments and Knol-like categorization may make Google Sites much
richer.