I’ve been running this Knol blog (though, ironically, Google’s project may actually be called Unipedia) with an occasional post, and paying attention to the space. Today I encountered Qassia (link goes to my profile page, as the site is in barely-private beta), which seems to be a startup in the Squidoo, Wikia and Mahalo vein. From their FAQ:
Qassia is a site to which you can add your websites. You can also add your knowledge, in the form of tidbits of information called “intel”. The more intel you add, the better your sites will rank, the more backlinks you get, and the more money you make.
Qassia is 100 percent free, and does not require reciprocal links. You can get unlimited quality backlinks to your websites from Qassia.
Before you get too excited, it’s not real money. It’s Qassia dollars. Which, according to the FAQ again, you’ll be able to spend on “front-page advertising, site-wide links, and other novel ways for you to burn through your hard-earned Qassia dollars”. Er, wahoo.
I built a page, just to check out the editing interface. Like the rest of the site, it’s pretty unremarkable. Clearly it’s just another attempt at the user-generated content plus SEO equals profit equation. None of these sites, as far as I can figure, is a threat to Wikipedia. Google Knol (or whatever), however, may be.
In any case, if you want to check out Qassia, there’s a sign up link on my profile page. In the interests of full disclosure, I get some magical Qassia bucks if you sign up. Maybe I’ll spend them on a puppy. Oh, uh, never mind.
I haven’t spent much time taking the temperature of the tech blogosphere, but early returns seem pretty underwhelming. That Macbook Air looks sexy, but this piece describes its manifold shortcomings. I still miss my lovely 12″ PowerBook, and the MacBook Air ain’t the replacement.
Rather randomly, I was inspired to register MacBookArian.comMacBookAryan.com, but I couldn’t think of anything to do with it. I can do a pretty good bad German accent…
About six or eight hours ago Yesterday (I lost a day somewhere), Google announced a new project which threatens the balance of expert content creation on the web. It’s called Google Knol (I’m not keen on that name):
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
For a while, I’ve been hunting around for a specific, technical, bloggable topic that I could sink my teeth into. Plus, I’ve wanted to mess around with the possibilities of monetizing blog content. This seemed like an obvious option, so I give you www.WriteGreatKnols.com. I’m going to take a shot at writing the definitive blog on Google’s latest fanciful endeavour. If it works, great. If not, no harm done.
It’s fresh off the (word)press, and in fact the domain may not even resolve for you for a while. Go check it out, if you’re at all interested (and I don’t blame you if you’re not) to hear some initial thoughts on the subject.
Here’s one random thought that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere. The blog post was written by one Udi Manber, VP of Engineering at Google. The sample ‘knol’–which basically means ‘article’–is written by a Rachel Manber, a professor at Stanford. I’d guess that they’re related, and that Udi can rely on Rachel to skillfully deflect all interview enquiries and respect whatever NDA she signed.
Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis invited me to check out his new human-powered search engine. Specifically, I installed Mahalo Follow, a kind of ’search buddy’ Firefox plug-in that pops open a sidebar when it thinks Mahalo has some content relevant to the page I’m on (mostly search engine results, but I think it’s opened on other pages as well). That content tends to be a list of the ‘best’ links associated with the content. Here’s an example.
Obviously this service is straight-out-of-alpha, and needs to be populated with much more carefully-selected content. But I don’t think it’s for me.
Like you, my dear readers, I’m a pretty sophisticated searcher. I’ve been doing it a long time, I understand how the search engines work, and so I usually have good intuition about where (and more importantly whether) I’m going to find a particular piece of information.
As an exercise in thinking about how I search, I made a little list of search queries I ran the other day. This isn’t complete, but it’s a pretty representative sampling:
How many units did the Sony Walkman sell?
What is the URL for iLife on Apple’s site?
What is the URL for Google AdWords?
When did Malta achieve independence?
Are there any Bill Callahan videos on YouTube?
What nationality is KT Tunstall?
Verify the correct spelling of ‘tchotchke’.
Where’s the trailer for ‘Atonement’?
What, if anything, do Dennis Leary and the BC Lions have in common?
What century was the Great Siege of Malta in?
What’s the URL for a Malta Times article I read in the paper?
What does the BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone look like?
Where’s the Wikipedia entry for Geocities?
How wide is Sicily?
Who is playing Johanna in Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd”?
General Knowledge About Plasma TVs
My searches are really specific. Mahalo seems to want to help me out most with general information (by providing links) on a topic.
I can imagine that, if I was seeking some general knowledge about a suject, Mahalo might be a decent resource. If, say, I wanted to know more about plasma TVs. But it’s quite rare that I want that kind of generalized information. And when I do, Wikipedia rarely fails me.
Speaking of Wikipedia, Mahalo will live and die on user-generated content. It pays contributors US $10 to $15 per page of search results they create. I might give it a try, but that money isn’t worth my time. If Mahalo agreed to share the revenue generated from that page with me, then it might eventually become a better deal.
Besides, I’d much rather contribute to the emerging collective knowledge of humanity that is Wikipedia. Mahalo, after all, is just a company.
UPDATE: In writing this article, I’d meant to cite a recent post by Seth Godin, in which he touches on the problem I gather Mahalo is trying to solve:
The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people and ideas.
But they’re terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can’t help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can’t help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can’t help me rank the service of four accounting firms.
