hassam
Is Knol A Good Place To Write?
July 28th 2008 17:34
Recently google announced there new service with the name 'Knol' which according to them, is considered to be a unit of knowledge. Since its announcement in 2007 there had been many speculations about the content of knol, many people were comparing it with wikipedia. But despite the fact it has got some of the features of wikipedia, it does not appear to be a wikipedia type site. Here are some of the points that could be summed about google knol.
• Google knol although has some features of wikipedia like moderated collaboration. But it gives the authors the ability to have control over there content, i.e. they opt either to keep the article open for editing or accept suggestion or completely close the article for any editing by another author. Now this in my opinion is a good step to improve individual articles.
• Now the feature that makes it different from wikipedia is that, it allows the users to make multiple articles on the same topic which mean one topic could have several articles; this however can reduce the overall authenticity of the articles.
• As far as the looks are considered the site appears too be neatly designed and good articles can catch visitors attention right on the main page. Although it looks that could articles would circulate on the main page from time to time, but since its release I didn’t see any change in the home page but hopefully this would be fixed.
• Now since the website looks like hubpage or squidoo like site with revenue sharing, there should have been similar features on the website like capsules, but I think it was a good step to not to include the capsules as it would make the website look too bulky for a good informative site. But there should have been features like comment moderation where comments could be moderated on knols all at once. Also there are no traffic stats available for the knols this is really some thing much required for the knols. There are no forums so far to have discussions on site’s performance.
• Like I mentioned the site has revenue sharing, but the add placemen appears to be very poor and I don’t think it would not monetize well unless google does something to bring in heavy traffic to these articles. The adsense placement on the site is on the extreme right column but I think if google removes the term ‘ads by google’ from the ads section people would be inclined to click on it.
• The search option also has some problems and knols published take nearly 8-12 hours to be indexed and none of the knols are so far indexed on google’s data base. There are no ads and adsense accounts are not being approved so far.
• One more feature about the knol is that it automatically searches similar content on the web and notifies the relevancy of the knol with another article on the web. This notification is placed on the knols in percentage. So if any thing is copied it gets placed with a link on the right side with the percentage of the text copied.
• The site is still in beta and need many updates, a lot of problems should be fixed to make it a good site.
Conclusion
From the looks of everythig the site I think is a good place to write, but the issues addressed above can make it a better place. For people like me who are hoping to get a good source of adsense income from knol, I think the just have to wait a month or two before google makes some updates. But what I think is that google will make some arrangements for indexing of knols on search engines, so at least people can expect could traffic to there knols.
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