Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Regardless of what you search for, Wikipedia usually has a high ranking - that equals a ton of traffic to the non-profit collaborative web property. Google’s answer to the monster that is Wikipedia is Knol, which is basically Wikipedia with more ownership and monetization. Knol, at its core, is a collection of “authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.”

Like Wikipedia, Knol is based on users creating content on specific topics which become searchable pages within Knols database. Unlike Wikipedia, once you visit Knol it will become very clear that the focus is on the author. Pages are created by authors who then have complete control over what changes are made to their page. Basically Knol wants to do away with the anonymity of topic pages and highlight the names of the people who have contributed to it.

“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.”

Another key differentiator is that Knol will allow multiple articles on a specific topic - unlike Wikipedia which usually has one all-inclusive subject page. Which article comes up first when you search on Knol (and maybe organic results) will be determined by various factors, including if the author is verified, comments and probably most importantly by how well the article is ranked and reviewed - basically the social concept of the crowd determines what rises to the top. How quickly before people figure out how to game this system? I give it 3 months.

To further separate Knol from Wikipedia each author has the ability to monetize their page through integratation of AdSense ads - this obvioulsy results in a incentive to create good, popular, content. The monetization of pages will draw immediate attention and content creation, but I question the purity of the content when making money comes into play. The beauty of Wikipedia is that the people that contribute do it for the greater good of sharing knowledge, not how much money they can make.

So what do I think about Knol? It is nothing original but things will get interesting once their is significant amounts of content being created. Of course anything done by Google has a chance at making it to the mainstream and must be watched closely. However, there are still many questions that need to be answered…how will Knols impact search rankings? How and where will Knols show up in organic results? What about the inevitable influx of spam? What will Google do about copyright issues? Google, and anyone involved in search, will really need to keep a close eye on this in the coming weeks and months to see how theese questions get answered.

Oh, and by the way, Knol will allow one New Yorker magazine cartoon per page…take that Wikipedia!

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