Google wants a piece of the Wikipedia pie
I came across an article which stated that Google's VP of Engineering, Udi Manber, announced Google's plans to launch a service called "Knol" (which stands for "Knowledge Unit") that allows individuals to share knowledge with the world. Essentially, Google is not content to see traffic driven to Wikipedia, which is one of the top visited sites on the Internet.
Social Networking is all the rage these days and social knowledge sites such as Wikipedia and Mahalo.com are proving that people are far better at creating and identifying content than well tweaked algorithms designed to pull a million needles out of the preverbal hay stack. Where social knowledge sites offer "educated search engines", sites like Google are more like "guessing engines". Who wants to be smarter than a fifth grader? Easy – search engines.
Google has far reaching goals, and Knol represents a necessary shift in the way Google is operating. Google seems to be moving away from cataloging content to creating it. It will be interesting to see whether offering incentives such as revenue sharing via its Ad programs will result in quality content generation. For example, how will copycat content be controlled? I can envision popular articles begging to be copied. Will this benefit the end consumer (search engine user) or make it harder to weed through an overload of content? Google may be facing a conflict of interests scenario. Who's to say that their Ad supported user created content won't be given preferential treatment (search results placement) over Wikipedia and other content providers?
Issues not withstanding, if Google can make sense of the information generated then perhaps jumping on the social knowledge bandwagon can be a good thing! I for one - can use a smarter search engine!
ZoeyBot.org site launch
I've launched the ZoeyBot.org website which features information about my ZoeyBot project, and the talented people already involved.
Discovery Education downsizes Cosmeo venture
Discovery has downsized staff from 100 to 3 people, citing the service as a profit drain. After subscribing to the site and using it I can clearly see the many ways in which Cosmeo went wrong. I enjoyed the site and felt it had great potential, however my 10 year old daughter Kaitlyn was bored and uninterested.
Despite the site's "something for everyone" feel, it seemed largely targeted at high school students, and significantly older geeks such as myself.
Carlos Justiniano: technologist, veteran software developer, world record holder, entrepreneur.