Only The Knol Knows?
Quotes and Comments
Google introduces “Googlepedia” and many think its to replace “Wikipedia” …
I’ll agree with those who say its business. Google is a business doing whatever it can to stay at the top of the heap. What is wrong with that? They offer us better tools and information and more opportunities to make money. What is wrong with that?
At the same time though, I might lean towards a concern about marketers and spammers taking their usual chunk out of it and minimizing its effectiveness. I doubt we need more claims of click fraud either.
And it may not even launch…
“Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only.”
“At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.”
Google, which is expected to earn more than $4 billion this year, also wants to make money off its encyclopedia. Although the resource will be available for free just like Google’s search engine, the company wants to place ads related to the topics covered on each page.
The advertising is an option being left up to the person submitting an article. Google is trying to persuade the writers to participate by guaranteeing they will receive a “substantial” share of the revenue.
The profit incentive could turn Google’s encyclopedia into a magnet for articles about highly commercial subjects instead of more academic topics, Wales predicted. ‘You may see an awful lot of articles about Viagra.’”
Possible Spammer Magnet?
“Call me cynical and cranky but given Google’s own track record with typosquatters and splogs I don’t see Knol being any different once the shining light of launch day is over and Google opens the floodgates for everyone to have their own Knol.”
“In some ways Google might not have a choice. Yahoo has Yahoo Answers; Microsoft has its own answers service; Wikipedia has experienced huge growth, and things like Mahalo get some attention since they use humans, which Google is seen to ignore. A service like Knol might be necessary to stay competitive.”
Tags: Google-Encyclopedia, Google-Knol, Googlepedia, Money-Maker, Spammer-MagnetRelated Stories
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1 opinion for Only The Knol Knows?
miranda
Dec 16, 2007 at 8:52 am
Googlepedia makes much more sense than knol!
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