Google Knol: What’s that Sound?
Google steps into the UGC ring and everyone (rightly) steps up and takes notice.
Knols Project: Google Experimenting With User Generated Encyclopedic Pages
Seems clear that Google’s got growth on its mind, and in an Adsense world, that means more pageviews. Knols will certainly fit that bill.
But comparing Knols to Wikipedia seems wrong to me. By asserting authorship, it doesn’t seem that Knols will be an effective crowdsourcer. Wikipedia is great because it is, at its heart, a collaborative effort — anyone can edit anything. Once you have authors, however, you write alone.
There’s certainly an interest in social networking and online identity these days, but crowdsourcing sits at the other end of the spectrum, where it’s not the individual that matters so much as the community.
We’ve seen many early experiments with collaborative storytelling that essentially string together many authors like frames in a film. What Wikipedia did was mash everyone’s contributions together — and you know what? It worked. People got it, they liked it. It spurred them to higher quality, since that’s all that keeps your contributions on the site.
Knols seems tied to authorship given the draw of money. If they could somehow keep the earning potential while removing the limitations of traditional authorship, they might actually have something.