Knol: Six Months Later
We featured Google Knol before. It was the search engine’s answer to wikis, albeit with an attempt to appear more valid and authoritative. It also tried to add accountability by asking users to provide their real names. Here’s a look at the project six months later:
First, the good news. Knol users have already published more than 100,000 pieces of knowledge and the project has a (shockingly) quick schedule of incremental releases.
Now the bad news: no one’s reading the site, and it’s awash in poor content.
The article goes on about what’s wrong with the site, but the main point is that Knol is missing its intended purpose. Far from being the factual wiki that it wants to be, the site is a has become a hodgepodge of knowledge ranging from actually useful articles to obscure information that serves little purpose. Google needs to refocus its effort on Knol or it’ll be next on the chopping block.
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