Knol management

Silicon Alley Investor asks why Google Knol hasn't been culled in the current Googlekrieg on bits of the business that burn cash:

This weekend, Google announced a Knol contest with $1,000 for the best entry and some cross-promotion with dummies.com.

We're not sure what the thinking here is. We're still not even sure what Knol is for. For a how-to, like performing car maintenance, we'll go to a site that's run by car-fanatics. For general knowledge, Knol can't come close to touching Wikipedia. If anything, Knol seems to have a reputation for nothing so much as plagiarism, ignorance, and self-promotion.

We admire Google's willingness to experiment with new ways to build cool (and potentially profitable) features onto their existing service. And we admire Google's willingness to realize when their experiments have failed and shut them down. So why still back Knol?

This brought a rapid response from Google's Matt Cutts, arguing that it is still alive and kicking. He notes 4 things we need to know about Knol, as possible reasons for sparing its life:

- Google Knol does not receive any sort of boost or advantage in Google’s rankings
- The conventional wisdom changed from “Google will give Knol unfair boosts in ranking; it will dominate the space!” to “Oh, Knol gets so little traffic that it’s not a success.
- The Knol team is not standing still.
- Knol is that when you want to write a quick article or put some information on the web, Knol is a great place to do it

Not exactly compelling reasons for continuing life - a biz model shift from wiki-paid-here to deli.cash.us.

When it was launched, we couldn't see how Knol would work in its current format (see analysis here) but I suspect that it hasn't been around long enough yet to be on the chopping block, would guess its probably in a set of projects that have been given X (say 6) more months to prove their viability.

A quick search on Knol brought up a direct-ish entry for Turkey, but none for Guillotine