bostongio - 5:44 pm on Dec 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

I'm not usually a Google naysayer, but this seems doomed to fail.

1. The rationale behind knol is dubious at best. "We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that." I'm sorry? Have you seen one of your tiny properties called Blogger where, in under 2 minutes, I can begin posting my "knowledge" to the Web?

2. Google saw all the money they're not making from general knowledge and information sites (since most don't run Adsense) and say, "Hey, how do we grab 50% of all those potential revenues?" This is the easy answer.

3. "Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors." In other words, every existing commercial site that Google already indexes will simply repurpose their millions of content articles as "knols" and be done with it. How Google will display one Insomnia knol over another isn't explained in the article. With hundreds of insomnia general information articles to choose from, is this going to be another popularity contest run by 'bots?

4. Publishers don't like their search engines competing directly against them in their arena. If Google goes down this road too strongly, you'll see a lot of publisher pushback from the big names.