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Google Knol, Revisited

I spotted yesterday as I was reading Arstechnica that Google had released the Knol project into the wild.

I decided that it would be appropriate to revisit the my previous Google Knol article and write something about this event. last year I had wrote an article called I Knol that! where I wrote and felt that the Knol project was a very aggressive action from Google and threatened Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica and lacked the use of crowd wisdom to aid the organisation of articles and facts by its users.

After spending sometime going through beta release of Google Knol I saw that there are many very long entries about medical topics. My instant reaction of the content was very long and lacked organisation.

It felt akin to reading back a very long MS Word document on you computer with very little in the way of styling for the content.

This I feel will be true for all Knols because the editing and presentation will all been controlled by the author of the Knol. In the future I feel that more work is required to improve the layout of content to improve the user experience. Perhaps providing the tools to export the content quickly and easily to different media and devices. Maybe even a Amazon Kindle?

However I do feel I was overly cautious about the project with the risks to Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. I believe that Google Knol will come into its own and differentiate its self by having academics publish papers and documents as Knols.

I think that the Google Knol will never become an encyclopaedia but would become and interesting services to store education and research content in the cloud. The risk to other web services like Wikipedia and Mahalo is how to game Google to come higher in search results than Google Knol articles which would have direct access to the Google Search Algorithm.

Will Google be able to remain transparent about how they index Knol?

The Arstechnica article by David Chartier, Pedias of world beware: Google Knol now open to the public.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence