Knol it all

Last week on the official Google blog, Udi Manber, Vice President of Engineering, announced that Google is testing a publishing platform called Knol. It's being compared to Wikipedia and Mahalo. While it's a somewhat different take on knowledge collection, Knol is suspected to be a wiki-like platform. Authors can create topics, and there are tools to interlink articles and content, but an article, or knol, is just a web page. Where it differs from a Wikipedia is its focus on the author, because all knols will highlight who wrote them.

That small difference becomes dramatic when you consider the main drawbacks of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a collaborative system. There is no author listed on a wiki page because a page may have many authors. If you really want to, you can get an idea of who said what on the history pages – depending on whether those who made the edits are registered users. If they are not registered users, you will only have an IP address for reference and since most IP addresses that identify end users are assigned dynamically by their ISPs, it will be difficult and virtually impossible in most cases, to find out who the people are.

Since Knol pages will be authored, users won't, presumably, be able to dive in and edit another page. They'll be able to submit edits to the author for approval, which will in a sense constitute a form of collaboration rather than haphazard anonymous editing. Also as a platform for authors who might want to make some money from their work, it's a better bet, as a Knol will allow authors to monetize their pages as they see fit.

Purists may think that since Google is in the business of monetizing content via advertising, it should not compete with other publishing platforms. However, this is not the first time that Google has gotten into this business. Blogger, of course, is Google's biggest success in text-publishing platforms. But Google also experimented with its own database, Google Base, in which it not only indexes the information but also stores it. And then there's YouTube.

In fact, Knol is best compared to Blogger, and eventually, it will have Digg-like elements too, so that readers can promote and share articles they like and not be limited by the rank of an article to find it. Knol is also like Blogger because it's a personal publishing platform. It's all about giving authors a platform for writing. It's just like a blog, but much more structured and shared in a more common environment. If you like a Knoller, you'll likely want to read more written by that person, or even subscribe to his work - and that you will be able to do on Knol.

It could become Digg-like, in that multiple Knol pages on the same topic will compete with each other. And while Google's Vice President (engineering) has hinted that the arbiter of the quality of a Knol will be Google search rankings, it is hard to imagine that there won't, at some point, be both a social network of Knol users and a main page that ranks the most popular Knol pages by votes, page views, discussion flow, or other group metrics.

At this point, based only on the official blog post, Knol looks like a solid end-user publishing platform. It is quite unlikely that it will create much of a dent on Wikipedia, since its author focus makes it much the antithesis of the open, community-driven wiki model. Knol looks more like a Google's version of About.com, Mahalo, or Squidoo.

There's no word yet, on when – or if – Knol will be released to the public, but you will read about it on Techno Page when it is released. (Picture credit: Google)