[p2p-research] Knolicules

[Samuel Rose]

Even thought it is easy to do, it is tough to convince people to add and
maintain the code changes necessary to decentralize things like this. This
is why it;s not happening now. We're getting closer, though..

Right now, an aggregated "knol" could be built with quite a few popular and
common tools (like anything that outputs an "rss", atom, or xml feed).

Here's my prediction for knol:

As with most "new" things, there will be lots of buzz and hype about it in
it's early days. People will be attracted by this, and by the fact that it
offers an alternative schema to wikipedia. But, over time, over the course
of 2, 3, 4 years, many people will realize that knol is basically another
variation of a web form online. The problems with scaling up the knol model
will also become apparent, problems like the fracturing nature of knol.
Removing
universal access to editing, over time, will see the evolution of knowledge
construction fragment into many, many ways to describe a given "thing".
While it is good that the adminstrative politics are removed, the equalizing
debate quality is also lessened. Co-editable pages tend to help people work
together towards understanding and shared meaning (provided there are not
overlords hijacking the process). The problem with wikipedia is not the
co-editable pages, it is the "leaders", the people who have the final say on
what goes in.  A comment box is not the same thing. I can ignore your
comment, but I cannot ignore your edit direct edit to my page. A proven
outcome of wiki can be the creation of a "pattern language". The exploration
of meaning through discussion and debate and co-authroing and editing of
knowledge. That is not just some utopian geek fantasy, it really works.

So, anyway, back to my prediction....when the audience peaks, drops off and
stabilizes, then so does the ad revenue money. Which those who were
motivated by ad revenue money to contribute will now decrease that
contribution and time invested. A small core of people will stay with knol
because they "love" it. And most of the rest will visit knol when it shows
up in searches, and that's about it. Contributor folks will move on to the
next "thing" that adds a new twist onto crowdsourcing knowledge.

I think that Wikia Inc may have realized this when they abandoned
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenServing
http://openserving.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page  they realized that sustaining
contributions in *your* space is tough to do, especially when primary
motivation is revenue sharing.

What I would really, really like to do is let people use their *existing*
published knowledge in very effective ways. Re-package and deliver in ways
that end users find very valuable for their unique end use context. I don't
want you to put it on my site, and I don't want you to place tacky ads next
to it. I want people to pay you for the value in your knowledge content
itself, because they were able  to *use  it* to *do something they care
about doing*.

Not that knol can't accomplish part of this (especially the repackaging so
that others can use to do soemthing they care about part). But why should
most or all of the money flow to Google when most of the value Google ads
could be added by you and others very easily? I don't even really care to
think about how Google could do it better. They already have enough money.
It is time to think about how people reading this can receive and deliver
the full value of their knowledge and work in the greater "network" of the
internet, without middle men siphoning it off. It's time to start obsoleting
the Googles, Yahoos, and other information ecology behemoths.



On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Martien van Steenbergen <
Martien at aardrock.com> wrote:

> good idea.and if it's incredibly easy to do and of any value, it
> definitely will happen.
>
> On 13 Aug 2008, at 17:00 , Samuel Rose wrote:
>
> What I am thinking is that Google could aggregate things that people
> semantically tag as a "knolicule". Google could offer their own web
> interface as they already do, but also aggregate and present stuff from
> other sites, so long as it has a few minimum elements. A few small code
> changes could allow all pages on p2p foundation to become "knol" pages,
> residing both on knol and p2pwiki for instance.
>
> This could work in much the same way that
> http://search.creativecommons.org/?q=knol works, except not just being
> search but also being a sort of mirroring of certain elements. What I am
> talking about will probably nver happen, but it could be increadibly easy to
> do :-)
>
>
>
>
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