Algumas percepções sobre o novo produto anunciado pelo google.
“Entre os novos sites de 2008, o que promete fazer mais barulho é o Google Knol (abreviatura da palavra ‘knowledge’, que significa conhecimento em inglês). Trata-se de uma enciclopédia aberta, ou seja, em que qualquer pessoa poderá colaborar. Exatamente como a Wikipedia, mas com uma grande diferença – na Google Knol, não será possível fazer edições e contribuições de forma anônima.”
Fonte: O Estado de S. Paulo – SP – Link – 31/12/2007, por Bruno Sayeg Garattoni. “Google prepara rival para a Wikipedia”
Abaixo mais alguns trechos interessantes:
“From a product perspective, Knol is not much different than existing products like Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s a new knowledge base for authors. Anyone, eventually, will be able to write on any topic they choose. Google will provide authoring tools, store the information, allow others to comment and suggest edits, add ads with the author’s approval, and provide traffic via their search engine.
But Knol isn’t really aimed at Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s much more likely that Google is jealously eyeing the massive traffic that flows through its search engine to Wikipedia. (…)
Wikipedia, a non-profit, has stubbornly resisted any efforts to monetize its pages. Google would kill to supply ads to Wikipedia. Barring that, competing with them makes a lot of sense.
Google needs to grow revenue to support their valuation. And for that, they need ad inventory. It wasn’t surprising when Google started hosting news directly and allowing comments (that = page views). So the idea of them hosting a knowledge base shouldn’t be surprising, either. (…)
Google says that Knol pages will be indexed into their search engine but will have no special ranking. That’s a little bit untrue, since they’ll be hosted by Google and will have the advantage of Google’s hefty PageRank to lift them in search results. And since no one will be auditing Google to ensure that Knol pages are treated just like everyone else, there are bound to be claims of conflict of interest. The fact is, Google will make money from Knol, and so they’ll have a financial interest in moving people to those pages. That makes them less believable in the role of a neutral gatekeeper. (…)
Anyone writing for Knol is likely to at least peruse Wikipedia content before publishing. And if they see anything good, they are at liberty to simply lift and copy it over to Knol, and get a adsense check for their time.”
Techcrunch, por Michael Arrington
A primeira impressão que tive foi, “que droga, eles não precisavam disso.” Santa inocência, batman.