| Here comes Google’s Knol ‘edge’ |
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| Written by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Saturday, 15 December 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 2 With Google itself the ultimate ‘answers’ engine, becoming popular because of the accuracy of its results, it was, in one way, not so surprising that Google’s Answers service was shut down. Given that it was a paid service, where people asking questions could pay others for answers, with Google presumably taking a cut, it ran a little differently to the rest of Google’s business, where targeted online advertising provided the bulk of the revenue and gave content creators a different way to earn revenue. There were also free Answers alternatives from Yahoo and others, offering competition. Clearly Google was thinking about how to do things differently, using its breadth and depth to provide a service that offered information on anything, and be available on any platform, Google Android powered or not. So Google’s desire to create its own knowledge base of information, called Knol, will be the replacement to the answers service that allows Google and content creators to create the biggest knowledge base there is on virtually everything. Google say they are making it easy for users to upload their knowledge to the service, taking care of hosting, providing writing tools and more free of charge – all users need to do is to write and contribute quality information, and choose whether or not to make money from advertising. While Google hasn’t mentioned competitors, the service will compete with Wikipedia, Squidoo, About.com, Mahalo, eHow, HowStuffWorks and others, with Internet users welcome to create their own pages at Google Knol on topics they’re knowledgeable about. Each page is dubbed a ‘knol’, for a unit of knowledge, filled with information by a content creator. Google is offering content creators the ability to have Google ads on their knol, or not. If the placement of ads is chosen, content creators will share in the revenue stream that is created. The difference is that each Knol will be owned by a content creator - it could be you or me - with Google placing emphasis on that person's expertise and opinions, rather than allowing anyone to contribute to a specific factual topic area and make edits to pages, as it the case with Wikipedia. This way, anyone with an interest in any topic can create their own knol, irrespective of whether or not a similar knol already exists, and add their perspective on the subject in question. Content creators can be as prolific or otherwise with their knowledge sharing, with popular knols likely to earn the content creator - and Google - more advertising revenue. Say, isn't this a little bit similar to YouTube? And what do Google say about the possibility of Knol pages ranking highly in search results compared with competitor content? Please read onto page 2 to continue... |
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