Got Wikipedia? Google does now.
I’m sure anyone of you that is reading my blog knows what Wikipedia is. It was a brilliant idea to bring everyone on the web together to create information knowledge database. But now, after years of Wikipedia.org’s domination, Google is moving into the space to take a sweet chunk of it.
The new tool called “Knol”, stands for “a unit of knowledge”, was announced by Google today.
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
So what’s so sweet about this? Let’s look at it from two different perspectives:
1. From Google Perspective, it means more traffic, more impression, and of course leads to more money. The idea of Wikipedia is already matured itself over the years, just like the blogs. It is less known to people who are not that technical, but for any programmers, a Wiki for a project is sometimes a must. But ever since the release of Wikipedia.org, you now get high school or college students put that on their homepage (why? think essay and boring researchs). In another words, Wiki has matured itself to draw enough attention on the web that converts into high quality of traffic. I don’t think i need to say more why this means more money for Google. See this picture for yourself:
2. From an end user perspective, we get more functions around the information than we had with Wikipedia. When you put all google’s currently offered applications on the table, it ain’t that hard to link them to Knol. Think about all the possibilities. I got a few here
- Knol Search (or wiki search if you will) backed by Google Search Engine
- Google Map integrated into Knol whenever there’s location involved
- Google Gears to let you take the information offline
- Knol Search inside of Blogger
This is by far one of the biggest news Google released on the 4th quarter. I would personally consider it as a nice Christmas present and great hopes for the new coming year for all of us.
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