Wikis versus Knols – Should we have named it KnoliChem?
Posted by: Antony Williams in UncategorizedCopyright©2007 Antony Williams
Less than 24 hours ago we declared the WiChempedia project underway. Now Google has introduced knol. Is it any surprise? Not really. Wikipedia has really garnered a lot of attention. What was conceptually an experiment in community collaboration for knowledge capture has worked…worked well. Looking across the web in general one has to wonder what isn’t getting picked up by Google? I used to manage finances on Yahoo…no longer. I have two gmail accounts but haven’t used hotmail in many months. I use Google reader, Google docs, Picasa and a Google screensaver. I do still have a Microsoft Passport (for Ebay). We’ve made a commitment to Microsoft Sharepoint as our development platform for our wiki. One has to wonder as we migrate data from Wikipedia to Sharepoint how long it will be before the MediaWiki format of Wikipedia will be supported by a converter to form a series of knols on the new Google platform? In fact, if I was Google that development would already be underway for early bragging rights…it’s very early days but does the announcement of Google knolbase start the bell tolling for Wikipedia?
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December 15th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Interesting blog entry. This is certainly an interesting play for Google. Some are comparing knol to blogger more than wikipedia. This is because the concept of “experts” and monetizing web site expertise is more of a blogger kind of application. A centralized blogger site for any topic.
Not sure if this is true, but the analogy seems to make sense. Guess we’ll all have to wait and see just exactly what Google means but this.
December 16th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Makes me think of grassy knolls
db
December 16th, 2007 at 9:57 am
I think this plays to Google’s weaknesses w.r.t. its competitors. Remember how Yahoo wiped the floor with Google Answers? Google are all powerful but their competitors (including Wikipedia now) have always had better community building skills.