A Google Knol on Disruptive Technology
Google just opened up their Knol capability to all Internet users. The Google concept for a Knol is that it is an authoritative article about a specific topic. It is a unit of knowledge. People can write what they want, but the idea is that they should put their name on it so there is some way to measure credibility. Others can contribute to the knol in measured ways. For example, a setting can be selected so that anyone can edit the entry, or anyone can suggest entries, or no one can suggest changes.
From the Google Blog entry:
“The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute
their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.”
Sounds cool, so I thought I’d give it a try. The first and most important step was trying to think of a subject to write about. I decided to take the easy way out and self-plagerize myself. I copied my list of disruptive technology and created a knol based on it.
I found the knol page was very easy to configure. Within about a minute I had my account active and copied in a bio so anyone interested could read about who I assert I am. I copied in my info on disruptive IT and hit publish and my knol was up. You can check it out here: Disruptive IT knol.
So far, I have to admit, I am not impressed. How could this be of more value than the list I already maintain?
But I’ll keep an open mind for a little while. My goal is to keep that list up to date with new information that will be of actionalble use to the enterprise Chief Technology Officer (CTO). If the knol concept enables a wider swath of people to read and contribute to that list, then it may be a useful concept. If, however, it generates no new information for me or my readers, then it will probably be easier for me just to maintain the list on my blog. Stay tuned and I’ll post more info on this topic after I see results.
Related posts:
There are a few concerns I have.
1) Anyone can create a knol on any topic so we could end up with 30 knols on disruptive technologies. If so, how is this different from just posting a page on Geocities.
2) Google getting into the content business makes me a little uncomfortable. While they claim a knol won’t get special page rankings, in two days of operation, we see knol pages on the first page of search results already displacing sites that have spent years building up their specialized content on a topic. Jason Calacanis has been posting interesting research surrounding this issue.
I went in and posted placeholder knols for “terrorism” and “homeland security” so feel free to edit them.
I updated my thoughts with a blog entry:
http://blog.devost.net/2008/07/25/does-knol-provide-null-value/
Matt,
Thanks much for both those comments. I have to agree with you regarding those concerns. I still want to keep an open mind here, but did you read Nicolas Carr’s Atlantic article on “Is Google Making us Stoopid?” I think he would appreciate reading your post and think we need to get it to his attention somehow.
Here is a quote from his article:
“For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
Bob
I just left a comment at Matt’s blog regarding his take on this, and in it I mentioned my concern that Google may tilt search results in favor of Knol listings over other Web pages. Your blog, for example, might fall below your Knol page in a query on Disruptive Technologies.
Once I submitted my comment, I checked to see if anyone has noticed such a skewing in their Google search results and — what a surprise — Google DOES seem to be doing precisely that. It was discovered by no less an authority than Danny Sullivan. You can read his findings here:
http://searchengineland.com/080724-140223.php
Dare Obasanjo follows up with other evidence here: http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/28/GooglesAssaultOnWikipedia.aspx
Not good, IMO.