Seth Goddin’s Squidoo.com caught a little more than the eye’s of Google. Seth has an interesting firsthand Google experience posted on his blog. Seth’s Squidoo.com lets you create online content on a topic you have knowledge about that you would like to share online. Much like Wikipedia, but as the author you get rated by the browsing audience.
Google announced their alpha version called Knol via their blog last week. When I read about this I didn’t flinch because the news didn’t seem big. After all, Amazon invented customer reviews of authors content online years ago. Google is really just applying it to content instead of books, an inevitable outcome. This was my initial thought, and a shallow one. My second thought is that it is not the technology that’s interesting in this direction by Google.
There is a clear evidence now that Google does no believe that the search algorithm is a search God.
Has Google been fighting the trend set by Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati and others for the last couple of years in democratic search rankings?
This could mark a peak in search algorithms as a primary method for information gathering. It’s nearly a clear admission that humans are better than robots when it comes to scrutinising content. A spammer can’t trick a human, by default the coder and hardware combination need to be better than your brain. Humans can tell when someone is selling via content or creating it for selling reasons.
Interestingly Wikipedia.org is getting a lot of mention from the bloggers out there as a threatened species because of the Knol announcement. I think Wikipedia will live on and actually stands to win this battle if they play it smart.
Wikipedia has a huge content lead time and volume advantage. Market penetration counts. Wikipedia could easily introduce author tagging and scrutinising features like voting, tag counts and referral counts. Some small changes by Wikipedia could address this weak advantage Knol has. Interesting times ahead.
