Next Modo

Google Knol has finally launched. If you’re not familiar with Knol yet it’s sort of like Wikipedia except that authorship is highly valued. I’m sure Google would love to own Wikipedia (imagine the ad revenue on all those millions of pages?), but it was never for sale so they did what any good business does and made their own version, and tried to make it better than the original.

I’m still up in the air about whether Knol will beat Wikipedia. Google has the brain power to do just about anything, but Wikipedia has a strong footing and a hard-core following. There will be a large number of people that will reject Google Knol simply because it’s built and managed by a for profit company.

I also see Knol as a place for spammers to congregate by the thousands. It will take some forward thinking to keep Knol from becoming a glorified article directory. Wait, isn’t that what it is already?