Doc Searls: Heard about Knol yet? It’s Google’s Xth new service, and it’s a place where you can put up “an authoritative article about a specific topic”. That’s a knol too. Article=knol. My first encounter with Knol was at Pointless Games, an entry by my friend Bernie DeKoven, a funsmith of the first water balloon. A knol, Knol tells us, is “a unit of knowledge”. I used to think a thought was one one of those, and I maybe even wrote that once somewhere; but when I search Google now for results that include my surname and exclude knol and google (specifically, searls “unit of knowledge ” -google -knol) I find nothing but articles by Searle, who apparently did say that. (Hard to tell. All the results are for abstracts of academic articles buried behind usewalls of various kinds. Meanwhile it annoys me that Google includes misspellings in its “advanced” search.) Naturally, Knol is being covered as a “rival” to Wikipedia. That’s exactly what CNet/ZDNet calls it. Social Computing Magazine calls it “The Wikipedia with a business model”. TechLounge calls it “Google’s Wikipedia”.
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http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/googles-knol-already-becoming-den-spam
Date added: 07/31/2008
knowledge management