Google's Knol shares ad revenues, but not trust

By Source Seeker on Thu, 07/24/08 - 9:19am.

Google went live with Knol, a new service that lets users contribute articles as "experts" on any subject. The twist is that authors can choose to run ads--placed by Google's AdSense--on their articles and then share in the revenue. How very un-Wikipedia-like.

In its blog introducing Knol, Google says Knol is a lot like Blogger, only it's designed to provide smaller, free-standing chunks of knowledge (or knols):

"Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic. The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading. Know how to fix a leaky toilet, but don't want to write a blog about fixing up your house? In that case, Knol is for you."

Unlike Wikipedia, readers won't be able to edit articles and there is no vetting process, although readers will be able to rate articles much like they do on Digg (which Google is rumored to be in the process of buying). While the ranking system will push the more popular 'knols' higher on the Knol home page, they won't affect placement of a Knol article on Google proper. That ranking will be determined in the usual way - according to how many other web pages link to them.

But something with Knol doesn't sit right with Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen. He notes that Knol is almost anti-user in that it incorporates something called Nofollow. As he says:

With Knol, "all your article’s outgoing links will be “nofollowed.” The nofollow attribute is a mechanism to disable the juice a link is sending to another site. So while you can link to Knol pages to give them more authority in the eyes of Googlebot and others, Knol pages do not pass this authority measure back to other sites."

Lenssen is concerned that Knol's nofollow mechanism is a precedent for how Google feels user-generated content should be handled on the Internet. While users may hold useful chunks of knowledge for Knols, they also need to be protected against. It's a strange mixed message: We know you have expertise and we're willing to use that to up our (and your) ad revenue, but we don't really trust you.