The Google Blog has announced a new product called "knol":

Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

It sounds fascinating and (to me, anyway) reads like a clear call to arms to create a competing service to Wikipedia, with several really awesome additions. It also allows contributors to put ads on their content and generate revenue from it.

One of the frequent (and many) criticisms of Wikipedia is the fact that anyone can write authoritatively on any subject without any real credentials, expertise, or (let's face it) understanding about what they're writing about. From Google's example knol it looks like they've clearly identified this as a major deal, and the association between an individual knol and the author will be a big part of this new service, providing users with great ability to determine if an article is written by an expert on the subject.

In case it's not obvious, I am hugely excited about this, and not just because it will help me win an argument with my flatmate (I predicted that something almost exactly like this was the future of wikipedia/open encyclopedias, although I was more concerned with cryptographic techniques to help you verify the identity of authors).

If you're wondering what the hell this has to do with games - it means if you become an expert in a particular subject about a particular game, you can write a knol for Google, get it up on their site, throw ads on it, and whenever anyone searches for that information, you'll get a bit of money out of it.

It also allows contributors to put ads on their content and generate revenue from it.

Add's "knol" to filterset.G

I for one welcome our new google overloards with open arms.

cool, i just got an invitation from google to write a knol about YA MUMS VADGE

sounds awesome.

wikipedia is pretty s***ty for anything economics related, tonnes of stuff isn't right from the somewhat misleading to the downright f***ing wrong. i only use that as an example cause it's what i know, i'm sure it's like that in other subject areas as well. hopefully this new service will be able to prevent that kind of thing.

cool, i just got an invitation from google to write a knol about YA DADS DICK...

thats just doesn't sound right.

yes it does because you said it.

Add's "knol" to filterset.G

seconded

i hope they only let people write articles about real things.... stuff like all 6000 different ways to finish zelda is really lame and invites the lower 5% of society to think they're normal

The problem is who decides that someone is an authority? A lot of topics have so many different experts that argue about the facts, how can you trust one particular person to give us a clear picture of the truth? This is their solution:

For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

but who wants to sift through people's opinions?

And then the 5 star rating, oh that is a low.

compition of ideas = internet... i dont want internet on a wikipedia type site

hmm interesting. To me looks more like a replacement for wordpress than wiki but I'm sure google will win again regardless.

Yeah I always thought my encyclopedia entries needed more adds...

Screw that, I can't see how it can be a wikipedia beater, but then it's google, and they are pretty good at stuff.

http://encyclopediaofstupid.com/stupid/images/8/8f/Wikipedia-logo.jpg

Maybe this one will make money

last edited by dRanged at 20:10:50 14/Dec/07

i hope they only let people write articles about real things.... stuff like all 6000 different ways to finish zelda is really lame and invites the lower 5% of society to think they're normal

like this wikipedia entry on filterset.G i had to look up. lol

The problem is who decides that someone is an authority?

they decide, google has already done this with the self hosted news items, bringing in authorities on both sides of a news event to comment on it.

now we just have to worry about google's bias... there's quite a bit of critism of the process for having sites included in googlenews, in particular that it's not transparent and is biased.

Hmm I didn't know that. I just thought it was any news site that has submitted it's feeds, and then they were weighted by pagerank. Well that would be more sensible anyway.

I only have one concern, if people are generating revenue from it, and looking at it as a business, "company" concerns may come first.