I just found a rather new service called Knol, A Unit of Knowledge. Of course it is Beta, like most Google Products, which probably also means, it still has some improvements to make. The site claims to be a place for people with an opinion or any authoritative knowledge, buy Zerit online to express themselves freely within certain guidelines. But within the same breath, they have a TOS which forbids anyone to use it as ‘bridge’ page. A page which has the sole purpose of redirecting users to another website. These are supposed tobe articles that can stand alone from an authoritative stand point.
Perhaps this is how it differs from a site such as hub pages which is a great tool for businesses to use to redirect traffic. But what I can’t figure out is how it is different than a Wiki, such as Wikipedia. Knol is a different kind of article directory or site and I think perhaps the intent is to have new more useful information added, rather than just a bunch of duplicated content, that has no real value to a user. The stress in a Knol is on the expert nature of the Author in some particular field. Maybe that’s what is different.
The Knol project officially had it’s public launch on 23 July 2008 and in January of 2009, they reached their 100,000th Knol. So I guess you could say they are growing quite rapidly in number of submissions, but what about the quality? Is it really authoritative and are businesses really able to capitlize on it? I think that remains be seen. Knol’s seem to rank for some people very high in the search results not only for Google, but Yahoo as well. So from that sense, it has a lot of hope.
In some ways, I think Google is trying to have a type of peer reviewed website, that has articles, written by professionals. They have a feature called moderated collaboration. Which allows users to change content and add to it, just like in Wikipedia, but the author of the Knol can either accept or reject it, so they remain in control of the content. I guess this is more closely like a peer reviewed process, but who is an expert? What happens if the supposed expert rejects most of the input from other experts? I guess this is why they classify the information as ‘Opinion‘.
Here’s one of the best Knols I saw on what a Knol is, how it works and the best practices of establishing yourself as an expert in your field. It is called How to Write Knols, That Rank ‘Top 10′“.
I do think this is a huge step in the right diretion though. Because it is quite apparant that we are reaching the point of saturation on the Internet, the information age finds most people not knowing what to believe most of the time, hungry for more, yet many aren’t any smarter because of it. It often takes a long time to find the information you want and many people just don’t have that time.
When I was in College and I had to write a paper and cite sources, most teachers didn’t consider Wikipedia a real source. They said the information was too subjective and often inaccurate, which to some extent might be a true statement. But I found that if I used it as a starting point, I could find links to many, many sites, journals and articles that would be very helpful to my research. In fact, Wikipedia then became a huge source of an already completed works cited list.
At any rate, this is certainly a directory to keep your eye on. If you haven’t looked into it, you might want to and also pay attention to your search results to see if what you are searching for Buy cheap Propecia Online is starting to display information from a Knol.
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