Saturday, December 15, 2007

Google Takes Aim at Wikipedia - WSJ.com

More on Knol

In an announcement on Google's corporate blog, Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering, said a knol on a particular subject "is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read." Wikipedia currently fills that role for many people searching for information on the Internet.

[...]

Mr. Manber, who had been chief executive of Amazon.com Inc.'s A9 subsidiary before joining Google last year, stressed that Google would not serve as editor in any manner and would exercise no control over the content.

A couple other variables, to add to my previous post:

1.  The correlation between quality/useful "knols" and direct financial compensation

2.  The extent to which Wikipedia, which already has many "natural monopoly" attributes,  can get creative and provide competitive compensation to the most productive/useful authors, if the correlation turns out to be pivotal

Google Takes Aim at Wikipedia - WSJ.com

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