Google's Knol Poses a Threat to Mahalo 4 comments
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About six months after first announcing a private beta test of its Knol project, Google (GOOG) has thrown the doors open, and is inviting anyone who wants to create an entry to jump on board. Unlike Wikipedia — to which it is most often compared — Google’s Knol allows authors to effectively take ownership of articles they write about topics in which they are (or believe themselves to be) experts. And instead of there just being one article on a subject, to which multiple authors contribute, Google says that it expects there to be multiple entries about a given topic, written by different people. Contributors can also offer their own edits to a particular article, which the author can choose to accept or not.
Obviously, a user-generated compendium of knowledge about a variety of topics sounds a lot like a little thing called Wikipedia, and there’s no question that Knol is going to compete with the crowd-sourced encyclopedia to some extent (Wikipedia has also been considering the addition of an “approval system,” which would make it even more like Knol). But I think Knol poses an even bigger threat to Mahalo, the people-powered search service created by Jason Calacanis — and to a lesser extent other directory-style tools like Seth Godin’s Squidoo and About.com (owned by the New York Times (NYT)), not to mention Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s Citizendium project.
Mahalo has a bit of a head start, but the model is surprisingly similar: get authors to create and “curate” articles about topics, with links and so on. Mahalo has also proven to be fairly successful at getting its results to show up high in Google searches — to the point where Allen Stern has called it “an SEO play.” But will it continue to rank as highly when entries on the same topic from Google’s own knowledge directory are available too? I doubt it. To add insult to injury, Knol will also allow authors to put AdSense on their pages and share in the revenue, which could make becoming an author fairly attractive — at least as attractive as Jason has made Mahalo, or Seth has made Squidoo.
As I said when I wrote about Knol back in December, I think it could become a pretty powerful tool, and the addition of Google AdSense is also potentially a game-changer. Any thoughts, Jason?
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This article has 4 comments:
I'm not sure what you mean when comparing Mahalo and Wikipedia and you say "some may be very bad." That's true of any product, editorial team or not. In this game the credibility is a game of percentages. I would say Wikipedia has less than Mahalo because Mahalo has a core team of editors vetting things. They even work within earshot of each other, so I'm sure there's plenty of back-and-forth in realtime.
But Wikipedia? Ask your local librarian. Or ask my wife. She went there the other day to look up an article and saw "JASON LOVES PAC-MAN" on the page. I assume that wasn't Calacanis, but you see my point. Visit the Mahalo page for Pac-Man to see the difference. On Mahalo, the options to find other sources of information (or just play the game) are right there in front of you.
Mat, I'd say Knol does indeed ramp this game up. Considering there are only so many slots on a page for results, eventually this will become a crazy SEO battle. As if it hadn't already!
knol.google.com/k/reg-...
REG CROWDER
International Investing (A Google Knol)