Thursday, December 13, 2007

re: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge

the official google blog put this article out today, encourage people to contribute knowledge

the blog is very interesting and it has some of the things about sharing that i've been talking about for a while:

There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.


the article quickly turns into an advertisement for something similar to wikipedia; and i didn't want to highlight that. thats too bad because i thought they were on track when they said, ""knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge", which is similar to my thought about 10 second vignette of knowledge. in that sense i think they might be falling short of their mission. wikipedia, and i guess neither will knol, doesn't really capture or encourage sharing. i suppose, it will initially, as people generate content. after a while you have a critical mass of things and then it will just sit there. anyway, i think the google blog identifies a very worthwhile goal, but i'm not sure their solution really attacks the problem as much as it should.

anyway, i was really excited for a little while after reading the first couple of paragraphs, then said to my self, "oh my they are copying wikipedia". in that sense i guess it was a disappointment.

1 comment:

aaron said...

i was really happy to find that many bloggers felt the same way i did about knol. its cool, because i promise that i thought of my comments totally by myself.

do some searching to find what other people are saying. here is one example: knol- a unit of boring knowledge