Knol and the Future of Webmasters

Knol since its announcement in Google's blog, is a source of discussion in forums and blogs, where it is presented as an alternative to Wikipedia, perhaps as a successor. What exactly?

Knol by Google

The title of the article "Encourage people to share their knowledge," demonstrates on one hand the desire to provide an efficient publication system, and on the other hand, to give the project an encyclopaedic and universal nature.
Here are a few quotations from the article where Google introduced his project...

Knol. The word is short for knowledge and a knol is an article in the universal encyclopedia:

"A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read."

"The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions."

Unlike Wikipedia, articles will have an author. Google turns away from the anonymity of Wikipedia:

"The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors (...) We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

"For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject."

Google will provide the system, which will host pages but also allow (anonymously this time) to contribute and comment on the articles to make Knol a community:

"Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest."

"People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it."

The articles will be integrated into a hypertext site that so builds an encyclopedia:

"Knols will also include references and links to additional information."

And also, and this is another major difference with Wikipedia, the author of a knol may include advertisements and collect incomes:

"At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads."

Finally, as the system is open and that everyone can contribute, Google has put in place a "research quality" which will select articles in search results.

Differences between Knol and Wikipedia

According to the infos provided in the announcement, Knol can therefore be situated as follows:

1) Knol will host the pages of an author as a Web site.
2) It will be a site with an encyclopedic vocation as Wikipedia and have a similar collaborative framework of management of articles and contributions.
3) It will provide tools to support the creation of pages as popfly and will be connected to tools, such as Google Maps to add a card to a Web page or as Google Earth.

For one hand Knol is a new Wikipedia with very advanced content features, but the essential difference is that there will not be an article by topic, but the authors could compete on the same topic.

The slogan of Google is "Don't be evil". The system for selecting articles to include as it appears will be different. Rather than asking anonymous visitors to vote for deletion from the wiki, it leaves the authors to put a link to the articles they like. Articles most often linked will reach the top of search results, others will be still there but invisible.

The future and success of Knol seems to depend entirely on the ability of the system to highlight one article, and make a reference that could outclass the equivalent article on Wikipedia.

The new Web

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