Knol, Is It Really That New?

Google has started with Knol, which they define as a unit of knowledge. Is it the same as Wikipedia? No. Knol wants to highlight the authors, and lend credibility to the content using the author’s name. Wikipedia is, culturally, in the opposite direction. Wikipedia uses the wisdom of crowds.

Is Knol same as Mahalo? Yes, in the sense that the page will be written by a human. But Mahalo seems to be about manually aggregating stuff from the Web, instead Knol seems to be about authoring original content.

Squidoo? There is some overlap, but Squidoo is about the layman, not credible authors.

I somehow feel that Knol is not terribly new. And then I think about the blogosphere. Is it not similar to that. The author, the person usually gets highlighted along with the content. Content by credible authors, usually, gets highlighted. There are some problems, but I do not see them going away in Knol. The only thing that goes away will be filtering away of a lot of “rest” of the content. Otherwise Knol seems to be like a muti-author blog.

One thing I know for sure is that when I am researching a subject, I cannot rest on just on credible author or an expert. Definitely not the one selected by Knol. I usually end up reading books, essays, articles, blogs by many people. Also, it is not only data, it is also their opinions and perceptions. I am not really sure if Knol will be really beneficial to someone doing a research. What would happen if there is better content outside Knol and the author refuses to give it away to them?

I wonder if Google would have been able to work with Wikipedia itself on this subject. Only for one problem. We have seen Google experimenting with the search results. This might just be another experiment, since a lot of first links in Google’s search result come from Wikipedia. If Google sees Wikipedia as a competitor for the first link, it sure is not going to work with it. In fact, it will come up with something to compete with it.

Tim Bray tries explains who might like this. I think most of the online communities will like it, that is what we do with most of the new products. But it will be interesting to see if Knol really addresses some existing problems and turns out to be different than what we have today.