It’s hard to enforce quality standards without a much higher level of collaboration.
— Martin 
Are you calling out weblogs as mostly spam, or trying to suggest that Google Knol will turn out alright even if 99% of it is useless crap?
There are clear differences between the “rotting” of content in weblogs vs. “knols”. The former (usually) act like news articles or diary entries—time sensitive, context specific, part of a series—while the latter are billed as authoritative treatments of some particular subject. Authoritative treatments of anything benefit from some kind of peer review, whether it is completely open and collaborative, like Wikipedia, or structured criticism from other expert colleagues, as with scientific journals.
> time sensitive, context specific, part of a series
So weblogs are totally different because they have a date in the URL? Knols have a “last edited” date and a list of articles “this author also wrote,” so this is a distinction without a difference.
The incessant comparisons to Wikipedia are irritating, since they’re a complete red herring. Knol isn’t an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It’s an About.com that anyone can edit.
— Mark
Maybe I’m not getting something abou Knol – is there some process by which Google actually checks the identity or credentials of the people writing the pages? If so, how? If not, why should we trust this any more than any other random web page?
For instance, here’s Franco Bellini’s page on 3D fitness (#2 in featured Knols at the top of the page at the time of writing):
http://knol.google.com/k/franco-bellini/3d-fitness/1c012nvyqth5m/2
How do we know that Franco is any more of an expert on this bullshit workout method than anyone else? Is it his awesome styling? Or his offer for private lessons? What about his sincere wish that “the force” be with us?
I know we’re all supposed to love Google (and I do!) but does this feel like Geocities 2008 to anyone else?
> is there some process by which Google actually checks the identity or credentials of the people writing the pages?
Identity, yes. Credentials, no. And therein lies the real problem, which danah completely missed. I’m not worried that Knol will attract spammers. I’m worried that it’ll attract lunatics — junk scientists, conspiracy theorists, you name it.
— Mark
I’m still not getting it:
>If you want to provide a verified name, click on Verify Name to provide credentials. You can either verify your name through the phone or by a credit card. Once your name is verified, a green Verified indicator will appear under your name.
So… they call you and ask you what your name is? Or they check that you give a valid credit car number? I know that establishing identity on the net is HARD. That’s why the VA has such a complicated process for going into a physical location, providing credentials, getting an account… blah blah blah. But Knol let’s you choose to verify or not? And the only way to know is if somebody has a green image? Will people know to look at that?
My buddy Franco doesn’t have a green image. In fact, “The requested biographical knol has been unpublished by the author.” So should I trust his 3D fitness article? There’s no entry in Wikipedia for the topic, so this entry is now the most page-ranky spot mentioning it in Google.
I guess what I’m getting at -and I apologize that I don’t have a fully-formed and organized opinion – is that basically, this is written by random people that may or may not know anything about the topic at hand, just like Wikipedia (and unlike About.com). But instead of having a whole community focused on editing out the bullshit and separating the wheat from the chaff, we just have comments – which may or may not be sock puppets – like “Goog [sic] Pictures: Franco, I love those pictures. Great work!”
What am I missing about this? What’s the magic where this stops being Geocities and becomes an awesome repository of knowledge?
> So should I trust his 3D fitness article?
I wouldn’t trust it any more or less than any other web page on the internet.
> What’s the magic where this stops being Geocities and becomes an awesome repository of knowledge?
The same magic that makes me trust anything Ian Hickson says about markup, or anything Glenn Greenwald says about politics: reputation built up over time by consistently high-quality writing. But reputation requires identity; how do I know I’m reading the real Ian Hickson? With mailing lists, it’s by email address. With blogs, it’s by domain name. Knol provides a publishing framework for authors who — for whatever reason — don’t want to maintain their own domain, and a framework for readers who want to verify that they’re reading the same author over time. That’s it.
— Mark
Why should an author publish an article on Knol instead of using a personal weblog? What is the incentive?
I think that Google is only trying to capture a share of Wikipedia’s pageviews so that they expand the number of “AdSensable” web pages.
Knol is being compared to Wikipedia because of the narrative spun around it on its announcement back whenever. Briefly: Google profits from ads, Wikipedia places highly on search results, Google gets squat from Wikipedia, requires alternative.
I don’t know who came up with this, or if it’s correct. But that’s the perception. It doesn’t matter if Knol is technically closer to a weblog or About.com. It’s perceived as a means of displacing some or all of Wikipedia’s attention. The comparisons to Wikipedia are inevitable. All of this reminds me of the old days when MS engineers would lament that geeks weren’t paying attention to the merits of their proposed technology or standards. Fun, fun.
— Ali
I wouldn’t compare Knol or Wikipedia to weblogs, in much the same way I wouldn’t compare Britannica to New York Times. (That doesn’t necessarily mean I believe Knol to be doomed to failure, but like the article author, it also doesn’t prevent me from criticizing it.)
It’s a difference in format and it’s a difference in fundamental focus. Weblogs are focused on opinion and commentary; Knol and Wikipedia are focused on being a point of reference for facts. No one’s expecting weblog entries to be continually revised, but in a reference media you’d like to be able to look up something in the same place and expect a coherent and comprehensive article, revised over time.
— Jesper
> I wouldn’t trust it any more or less than any other web page on the internet.
So it is just Geocities, but with a Google URL, a nicer default template, and the illusion that people’s credentials are what they say they are? Huh.
I’ve looked at a couple dozen “knols” now – certainly not a representative sample, and the majority are bullshit. I certainly hope it gets better over time, as the imprimatur of Google is going to make a lot of gullible people think they can trust whatever they find there. I guess sheep are meant to be fleeced.
The thing that always bugged me about Wikipedia is how the writing style guidelines were in effect to weed out individual prose styles and opinons.
— Dan
I don’t know who came up with this, or if it’s correct.
Aren’t most weblogs spam? We may not notice them too much because they are easily identifiable to a human, and we ignore them as noise unless they send us trackbacks, comment spam, rip off content we care about or clog up our search results, but I bet the number of splogs is growing faster than Facebook.
The “advantage” weblogs have over centralized sites is that the crap is spread out over all the internet, and we treat these individual soap boxes as, well, individuals. We find them one by one, and judge each one as a single source of stuff. Nobody cares about blogspot as a collective: Blogger presents a write-only approach.
Wordpress.com does curated lists, though, which could be seen as an interesting go at building something like Knol organically. But if it was working, someone would have been gaming it.
> Aren’t most weblogs spam?
Yes, and we are often able to avoid them because Google does such a good job identifying and de-listing them. So how will they treat weblog style spam on Knol?
> [The distinction between weblogs and knols] is a distinction without a difference. [...]
> Knol provides a publishing framework for authors who — for whatever reason — don’t want to maintain their own domain, and a framework for readers who want to verify that they’re reading the same author over time. That’s it.
So then the two questions I have are, (1) who are these authors, and are their needs best served by Knol? What is better about Knol than any blog hosting site, or something like Jottit, &c.? and (2) Why is a “knol” billed as an “authoritative article about a specific topic”, instead of as a blog post with optional verified identity?
You don’t think it’s at least a bit misleading for Google to suggest that knols are authoritative, if the vast majority of them are expected to be complete garbage?
— Jacob Rus
> So how will they treat weblog style spam on Knol?
Probably the same way they treat weblog spam on weblogs.
From Knol Content Policy: “If you believe that someone is violating our Content Policy or our Terms of Service, please click on the ‘Flag inappropriate content’ link on the Knol page that contains the objectionable content. If you report abuse, we’ll review your report and take action if appropriate.”
— Mark
> who are these authors, and are their needs best served by Knol?
Honestly, I have no idea. Who are these people who set up a blogspot.com blog instead of purchasing their own domain and installing their own blogging software? This blog used to be hosted on weblogger.com until I moved it to its own domain. “Dive into Python” used to be hosted on Geocities (yes, THE Geocities) until I moved it to its own domain. Self-hosting costs me a few hundred dollars a year in hosting and domain fees, and more time than I’d like to admit in ongoing maintenance, and I wouldn’t trade it for any hosted service in the world. But most people don’t care about the things I care about. Knol publishing has a low barrier to entry — even lower than setting up a blogspot.com blog — and maybe that will attract new authors. Or maybe it will just attract spammers and lunatics.
— Mark
It ain’t a wiki … it’s a stinkin’ moblog … probably doing for spamblogs what thousands of monkeys with aggregators could do; only on a better server platform.
> Probably the same way they treat weblog spam on weblogs.
Except that many aren’t exactly spam – just useless pages selling some bullshit product or service by purporting to be an article about whatever the bullshit topic is. And again, people will trust this crap because it comes from Google. Blech.