Google recently announced Knol, a new personal publishing platform than hopes to enable people to to author authoritative content.

“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it,” writes Udi Manber, VP Engineering. “The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts to medical information, from geographical and historical to entertainment, from product information to how-to-fix-it instructions.”

Google Blog Post

As soon as this post went live on Google’s blog people started calling it a Wikipedia rival. Cnet’s Tom Espiner went so far as to say:

Search and advertising giant Google is developing a user-generated online encyclopedia that could rival Wikipedia.
Read Tom’s article

My problem is that looking at the functionality and the focus it seems more like a non-geek blogging platform designed to get people to write about subjects as if they were experts. If anything, it is more like About.com. It is hardly a Wikipedia rival. For those of you who may not have realized this, Wikipedia is a wiki first and an encyclopidia of knowledge second. What makes it “great” is the fact that it accounts for a “collective knowledge” rather than an individuals knowledge. It is the collective that writes each page. It is the collective to which each producer of content is accountable and without the ability to have the collective edit and re-work each page, it would not be possible.

But, let’s get out of web 2.0 for a second. Let’s go back to web 1.0. Remember Geocities? For those of you who don’t, way back in 1994 there was a tool for building personal home pages called Geocities. It was originally intended to give anyone a voice on the web by providing free web pages. Wikipedia has loads more information on it. What google has done here is said, “Okay, we want to have the experts write on the web using our platform, how can we do that?” So they took the Geocities concept from web 1.0, decided to organize it into something that they are calling an encyclopedia, made it possible for contributors have the option of revenue sharing for their articles, and took the ranking systems similar to Digg or Newsvine along with a few other 2.0 features and poof… you have Knol.

Some might call it genius. But I am skeptical. Don’t get me wrong, I think Google has done some amazing things, but this one seems off the mark. Why you ask? Well, without the community actually being able to contribute and edit each other’s pages what Knol will create is a mess. It will be a few of people writing so called “expert articles” and still more writing absolute crap.

Okay, some will say that Knol is way better than Geocities and this isn’t a fair comparison. Let’s say I give that to them, and instead we look at about.com. You may think about.com is a search engine, but that is far from the truth. About.com “is” the closest thing to Knol. It’s content is organized in logical categories and they attempt to have experts write about everything online. My issue with About.com has always been that the “expert information” lacks the depth needed to be anything of real value. Most of the time it is fluff. Which is to say there is just enough information there to have a light conversation but never enough to get any real work done. Where do I go for deep information?? Ahem.. cough- wikipedia.

So, is knol going to be an About.com killer? That may be the real question of the moment. But one thing we do know is that it is definitely not a Wikipedia rival.