Remember when the tech world saw Google as an idealistic savour? Those days are well and truly over.
Over the past few years, Google have pulled several stunts which go against their Don’t Be Evil motto. I’m tired of it… obviously Google have given up on many of their ethical ways. So yeah, be evil Google. We expect it now.
- Google allow, and aid, the Chinese government in censoring Google results.
- Google also allow the US government to censor results as per the Digital Millenniums Copyright Act.
- Google censor many areas on Google Earth. This may not be evil, though, and might be in the interest of (inter)national security.
- Google read our mail to give us relevant ads. Do I see an opt-out anywhere?
- Google log our search history.
- Google called a Jabber service Google Talk, instead of simply Google Jabber etc. which would promote XMPP even more!
- Google are setting-up Knol to compete with Wikipedia. One step too far… Google should be actively supporting a free, not-for-profit project like Wikipedia instead of competing with them. It doesn’t assist Wikipedia by making them compete; Google should be encouraging its users to edit Wikipedia! Maybe Google see Wikipedia as communist and don’t see the point in a non-profit website!
Google have done much more good than they have evil. Still, I see Google going down a slippery slope. I think using Scroogle (I’m not a Daniel Brandt fan!) is still one step too far at this point!
Tags: google, wikipedia, knol, don’t be evil
I completely agree. This move for me is the last straw.
This is not competition with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. This is neither free nor an encyclopedia, and no one can edit it except the original author. It’s more like a blog.
I don’t think that Knol is competing against Wikipedia. Wikipedia competes against other encyclopedias. They do it by harnessing the knowledge of all internet users to produce some pretty good content. They also have a much cheaper distribution network than the encyclopedias who have to print, distribute, sell, and bill for heavy books and CDs.
From the looks of it, Google is competing against the magazine publishing industry, and it makes sense. I’m sure that there are many folks who have plenty of knowledge and expertise to share, and would love to share it, except that they cannot write well enough, nor can they tolerate the process of ingratiating themselves with magazine editors in order to get published. Google offers them a publishing platform. It is better than a blog because it has the relatively timeless nature of a magazine article than the relatively temporal nature of a blog.
It gets even better. Other folks have suggested that Google will enable tagging, page ranking, etc for the articles. Once articles are tagged, it will be easy for aggregators to put a set of articles together as an internet magazine under a common theme. Monetization will be fair because Knol awards revenue sharing of ads directly to the author, while the magazines themselves can create ways to get compensated for aggregating the content.
For aggregators, the ad revenue will quickly reveal which articles or authors are more or less desirable for their magazine, and this will lead to better quality aggregations. However the aggregators will have to compete hard because setting up competing e-magazines will be easy.
For writers, I’m sure that third party services will emerge to provide editorial and layout services as well. This too will compete against what the magazine publishers offer.
All of this will drive down the cost of magazine subscriptions from $50/year or more to about $10/year for internet magazines of comparable quality. Since there is nothing to print, distribute, or sell, $10/year cost is a high-margin business. Of course, at $10/year, there is no point billing people, so it will probably be better used as a mechanism to drive traffic and build credibility as an information aggregator.
There are more than a few high-quality magazines that I would love to be able to read, except for the cost. I think that Google Knol will enable this.
Overall, Knol is not evil. It is good. It is good because Google is going to use the internet and their computing infrastructure to help break yet another monopoly. That will mean lower prices and higher value for everybody.
^ Thats a frikkin long comment.
I can imagine Google starting a mission to kill you Joe. Deviator of Google love.
How soon will it be before “knol” takes on a verb function in everyday spoken and written English? Well, why not right now? But wait a minute! Will it be a regular or an irregular verb, transitive, intransitive or both? If “knol” is to be used as a regular verb, then that’s easy enough: a) infinitive form, of course, “to knol”; b) past tense, obviously, as well as the past participle, “knoled” — but hold on right there! Should that be one “l” of two? Perhaps both the so-called American English version as well as the British-English will be accepted. (Or is that English-English? Commonwealth-English? I’ve never really been able to figure that one out. But I digress; please bear with me.)
So, anyway, then we can have “knolled” and “knoled”, giving us also “knolling” and “knoling” for both the “ing” forms, the active participle and the gerund action.
However, if “knol” were to become an irregular verb, who would determine its proper spelling, let alone its pronunciation. This is a rather complex issue to contend with for lexicographers, who already have enough difficulties keeping track of all the new words entering the English language almost exponentially moment by moment on a monthly if not a weekly or even, God forbid, a daily basis. I’ll try to help out here.
If “knol” is to be considered an irregular verb, “knolling” and/or “knoling” will still work just fine for the present participial spelling. But how about this for the irregular verb past tense form and the past participle? I propose simply using “knel” as the past tense and “knoln” as the past perfect, rendering up this hyphenated adjective,”well-knoln”, for any knol that ranks high in the search engines, and not just the Google search engine, but for any search engine whatsoever on the World Wide Web, be it Yahoo! or MSN or Ask, Quintura or Dogpile or ChaCha. The Knol Website might belong to Google, but how could Google lay claim to “knol” as a word and still do no evil? Case in point, does the word “google” belong to Google?
As for the intransitive versus transitive question? Well, for one, who besides yours truly is even asking a stupid question like this? And as for the answer, or at least a response to said stupid question, I suggest: Both, as in, “He knolls twice a day.” and “She knel it before I did, so I moderately collaborated to fix her knolling.”
This brings us to the passive voice form of this new verb, that is, “be” + “knoln” (+ by someone).
For example, “It is often knoln by Iago.” The word “it” here most likely would be the subject matter at hand, as in the case of this piece of writing right here, wherein one might point out the obvious: “This knolling is being knolled by yours truly.”