The Googlization of Everything

if:book: a few rough notes on knols:

... Google's new encyclopedia will go head to head with Wikipedia in the search rankings, though in format it more resembles other ad-supported, single-author info sources like the About.com or Squidoo. The knol-verse (how the hell do we speak of these things as a whole?) will be a Darwinian writers' market where the fittest knols rise to the top. Anyone can write one. Google will host it for free. Multiple knols can compete on a single topic. Readers can respond to and evaluate knols through simple community rating tools. Content belongs solely to the author, who can license it in any way he/she chooses (all rights reserved, Creative Commons, etc.). Authors have the option of having contextual ads run to the side, revenues from which are shared with Google. There is no vetting or editorial input from Google whatsoever.

Except... Might not the ads exert their own subtle editorial influence? In this entrepreneurial writers' fray, will authors craft their knols for AdSense optimization? Will they become, consciously or not, shills for the companies that place the ads (I'm thinking especially of high impact topic areas like health and medicine)? Whatever you may think of Wikipedia, it has a certain integrity in being ad-free. The mission is clear and direct: to build a comprehensive free encyclopedia for the Web. The range of content has no correlation to marketability or revenue potential. It's simply a big compendium of stuff, the only mention of money being a frank electronic tip jar at the top of each page. The Googlepedia, in contrast, is fundamentally an advertising platform. What will such an encyclopedia look like? ...

And here is a helpful article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

... The question is, which model will produce a better quick-reference guide?

Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University’s continuing-studies program and author of the blog OpenCulture, picks Wikipedia to win this face off. He thinks that Google’s planned encyclopedia will have a hard time attracting experts to write articles, whereas Wikipedia works by letting everyone write articles that are then often corrected by experts.

“Take my word for it,” writes Mr. Colman. “I’ve spent the past five years trying to get scholars from elite universities, including Stanford, to bring their ideas to the outside world, and it’s often not their first priority. They just have too many other things competing for their time.” ...

UPDATE: Peter Suber at Open Access News offers these comments on Knol:

* The sample knol to which Manber links uses a CC-BY license. Note to Google: this is worth boasting about. The content is not only free of charge, but free of needless copyright and licensing restrictions. It's open access. Will all knols use the CC-BY license? Will it be up to the author?
* This is fascinating project. The Google name, and the visibility of knols in the Google search index, will attract readers, and that should attract authors. The Google resources mean it could scale to arbitrary size. At first I thought that knols would challenge Wikipedia and Citizendium more than scholarly journals, since promotion and tenure committees are not likely to reward the writing of unrefereed knols. But then I realized that knols could supplement or supplant postprint archiving. Nothing in Manber's description suggests that articles already published in peer-reviewed journals couldn't become knols. To show their credentials, they could (and should) cite and link to the published original. If there's a barrier, it would come from the journal's side (the copyright transfer agreement or self-archiving policy), not from the knols side. The question is whether authors of journal articles will be inclined post their peer-reviewed manuscripts as Google knols. Will they do it at all? Will they do it in addition to depositing them in an OA repository? Will they do it instead of depositing them in a repository?
* Here's a first whack at thinking about how authors may weigh up the pros and cons. (1) Advantages of knols for peer-reviewed postprints: Full OA. CC licenses. Obvious visibility to search engines. Searchable full-text, not just metadata. Built-in community tools. Not PDF. Ad revenue option. Available to authors who don't have a repository in their institution or discipline. (2) Drawbacks: May require porting the text and reformatting it with Google's editing tools, not just a deposit. (How soon will someone write a flexible knols import-export tool?) Not built on free and open source software. Off-limits to journals permitting self-archiving only in the author's institutional repository. Not affiliated with a research institution or research field. Long-term preservation efforts unclear. Stewardship by a for-profit corporation, not by academic librarians. (3) A wash: Not OAI-compliant, but does it need to be?
* Two suggestions to make it more useful and appealing: open the source code, or at least the API, and arrange to back up the content in a trustworthy academic or national library independent of Google.

To this I would add: CHANGE THE STUPID NAME.

My own reaction is TK, as they say in the news business. I am still working on my day job today.