Google Testing Knol, New York Times Positions It as Competitive to Wikipedia (?!)

• Dec 15th, 2007
• Posted by Spring Creek Group
• Posted in Uncategorized

Today’s New York Times (some say Saturday’s Times is the least read, which I suspect is due to New Yorkers’ long Friday nights and longer Saturday morning sleep-ins, but out here on the early-rising west coast I eat it up) covers a test program that Google is doing to test the viability and popularity, (and their potential future financial interest in), a new service called Knol that allows users to create dedicated pages on any topic they want… with their own by-line. The added twist with Knol on the typical wiki model is that any given topic page may only be edited by the individual who originally wrote it. Other users who feel they have something to offer on the topic must create their own, new, dedicated page on the same topic. Presumeably, then, over time the “wisdom of the crowds” kicks in and the best pages for each topic rise to the top of page views.

Google’s Knol model sounds pretty similar, actually, to Seth Godin’s Squidoo… which has been kind of bubbling along largely under the radar (and with lower pageranks on their topic pages than About.com and Wikipedia‘s pages, which mostly dominate search results).  Squidoo allows authors of pages to enjoy the benefit of advertising revenue that results from page views.  As the article reports, Google is likely angling for an opportunity to generate advertising revenue with contextual ads served on Knol pages.
You can read more about the whole thing here, or go straight to the source and read the “official” Google announcement (done in true Web2.0 style, via one of their internal blogs, here).
What I find interesting about the article is the positioning of this move as strategically competitive against Jimmy Wales’ grand experiment with Wikipedia.  I’m not sure I get this angle.  As the article points out, Wikipedia is both non-commercial and non-advertising-supported. While Wales isn’t purely altruistic, the reality is that Wikipedia is largely a “social good” similar to the free search results themselves that Google serves up at the core of their service. Whereas Wikipedia does not accept or serve advertising against its pages, Google has proven countless times over by now that it is firmly a commercial enterprise — a profit-making entity that says its credo is “Don’t Be Evil” (and organized around their  “Ten Things” Philosophy) but seems to principally follow the practice “Don’t Be Unprofitable”.

We’ll see whether Knol turns out to present an interesting “alternative wiki” model for the Web. [ Anyone ready to coin a term? How about "meki"? ]  If it does, perhaps some of the grillion contributors to Wikipedia’s ever-growing site will find that the greed factor will push them to add their creativity and knowledge to Knol instead. If it doesn’t, it strikes me that the reason will be that the power of collective intellect and collaboration primarily works best when it’s directed towards the same project, rather than when it’s directed towards numerous separate independent projects.

I remember when we did a thought-experiment in a strategy class at b-school. First, the class was asked to complete a 30-question test. Then we were asked to get into groups of 5 and work together in our sub-groups to collaboratively complete the test again on a new sheet of paper (without the benefit of having received the correct answers yet).  Once everyone was finished the second time around, the correct answers were presented and scores were tallied on both the individually-completed tests and the group-collaboration-completed tests. Can you guess what happened? The prof said it happens every time. I’ll end the suspense:  the top score that any one individual scored on the test was something like 22, but the top score achieved by one of the group-collaboration tests was 28… and 4 out of 6 of the group-collaboration tests resulted in scores higher than 22, the best result among all of the individual tests.

Lesson:  collaboration results in the outcome benefiting from several different, complementary bases of knowledge, whereas individual enterprise — even among the extremely knowledgeable and smart — can only produce a result as successful as the knowledge contained within that one solitary brain.

I don’t doubt that, as a profit-making enterprise, Google has a motivation to provide incentives for a world of smart people to generate many many many new webpages on given topics… because that gives Google many many many pages against which to serve advertising, rather than just one particularly good page.  What I wonder is whether the efficacy — and relevance — of any one of the best of those Knol pages on a given topic will ever be able to achieve the relevance and accuracy of the one, single Wikipedia page that continues its ever-collaborative life benefiting from many many many people working together rather than out there all on their own.

We’ll see. Greed is a powerful motivator — perhaps the most powerful incentive to human creation ever to exist. But the desire for accuracy is a pretty powerful one, too… and the lesson of the history of human enterprise (and a particular strategy course at graduate school) is that working together usually produces a more valuable end result than any one person toiling away in solitary confinement – no matter what their motivation.

Happy meki’ing.