Yesterday Google opened its Knol project to the public. In Google-speak a knol is “a unit of knowledge”, and it’s aiming to be a successor to the immensly popular and sometimes accurate Wikipedia.
I thought I’d have a play with it, so when searching for web development and finding nothing, I decided I’d write my own knol on the subject. Little to my knowledge, the lack of results is not to suggest a gaping void but rather an indication that the search system isn’t particularly solid yet. Oh the irony.
It’s a fairly easy-to-use system which requires virtually no learning curve. (If you can use a decent blog engine or a word processor you should be comfortable with the Knol interface.)
Unlike the complex code and techniques required to write Wiki articles, knols are written in HTML which is validated by the rich text editor that Google provides. I would have preferred not to see the option to change font faces, colours and sizes, as these are too open to abuse and left to the mercy of people’s differing design principles...or lack thereof.
That aside, there are some useful, user-friendly features which should help to truly democratise the sharing and consumption of knowledge. The site allows readers to suggest revisions which have to be approved by the original article author(s) [there can be many authors for one knol]. The author can see the original article with the suggested additions highlighted in green and omissions in red.
There are a few bugs: obviously the search isn’t fully awake yet - unless there is a delay between the article’s publish time and the time in which it is indexed - and there a few, very minor JavaScript errors, but it’s a clean, uncluttered and readable design. Hopefully that will keep, as I think part of the problem with Wikis is their habit of looking especially “techie”, with their multiple shades of grey and various small tabs.
Time will of course tell as to whether Google’s “me too” project will take off, and how soon it is (if ever) before knols replace Wikipedia articles at the top of search results for phrases starting with “what is”. In the meantime I remain skeptically optimistic!
