Google Knol Takes Aim at Wikipedia, Others - Google Says They are Not Editors
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So we know that knols can promote duplicate content. What about defamatory content? In Elinor Mills' CNet article on writing a knol, she mentions that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' ex-girlfriend Rachel Marsden wrote a knol about him in which she described Wikipedia as an “online libel board” that “any loser can use to smear people who are more successful than them.” Google said in response to Mills' questions about that knol that they aren't editors, and that there are community tools in place to help flag items that cross legal lines. “In addition, because knols are attached to verified author names, we think that the structure of Knol will actually provide something of a disincentive to defamatory or other harmful content,” the Google spokesperson said.
I think something must be working here, because when I searched for that specific knol using several different keywords, I couldn't find it. One imagines the community flagged it enough to bring it to the attention of someone at Google who realized this could cause issues. Google may be a search engine, not an editor, but all of a sudden it's faced with the same concerns of a content company.
Which brings us to the most dangerous point of all. Google isn't just a search company any more. As Jason Calacanis observed, it's now a content company. He doesn't buy protestations from David Eun, Google's head of partnership, that Google has no aspirations to become a media company. “We don't produce content. In fact, we see ourselves as a platform for our partners that do,” Eun said.
According to Calacanis, though, Google is splitting hairs that don't even exist. He made a list of five important things that a content publisher does, and showed that Google Knol does all of these things. Here's his list:
- Hire writers. Google can be loosely interpreted to do this on contingency.
- Distribute their work. Calacanis maintains that Google distributes their work in its own search results – which it arguably does, given the points I made earlier about Google favoring its own knols over other authority content.
- Sell advertising against the content. As I mentioned, that's an option that any author can opt into.
- Pay the writers. Google does that via AdSense split. Just because some writers can opt out of payment doesn't mean that others aren't getting paid. After all, even newspapers have letters to the editor, which they publish for free.
- Build a library of that work for future monetization. Yes, Google is clearly building a knol archive.
Just because Google itself doesn't own the content doesn't mean that it is not in the content business. Given that a lot of publishers get a huge chunk of their traffic from Google, and that Google is ranking many knols higher than similar content on authority sites...well, you can do the math. Calacanis notes that Google getting into the content business, when they already dominate the search business, looks like a play for a monopoly.
“This feels exactly like what Microsoft did to its application vendors,” he explained. “Microsoft convinced folks to build WordStar, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro Pro for their operating system. They grew that business together until the point that Microsoft had massive market-share in operating systems – then Microsoft pulled the rug out from under the 3rd party application vendors.”
So is Google turning into a monopoly? It could happen. It seems like they're trying to own more of a user's attention, and that's a valuable commodity when you're selling ads. This situation needs to be watched very closely. And if you don't have a knol yet, you might want to write one soon.
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