Wikipedia dominates organic search results because of the overwhelming authority of its content. Yet all that huge amount of content resides at one domain and it’s not-for-profit which understandably irritates some revenuers on the web. Now Google announces their Wiki-killer, knol- which stands for unit of knowledge in whatever language they speak in the googleplex. Knol will allow anyone to build a page on a subject they are an expert in, similiar to Wikipedia with three big differences:
- You are identified as the author including bio material, site links etc.
- Ads are served up on the page and there is a revenue share with the author.
- Google will rank the page and show it in relevant results.
As a writer the implications of this blow my mind. As a domainer it freaks me out. The writer says that all I have to do is post the text of my generally recognized authoritative book on kitchen design on Knol (my brother and I retained Internet rights to it) and I should have the top ranking for that search and earn boodles. The domainer says all my kitchen design domains just lost value.
This is a major play by Google. However it forces me to ask myself:
‘Why not spend my time developing knols and not bother with domains?’
I’m still contemplating the implications of this. Yet, who knows, it may not turn into anything…but I think it will, and fast. There’s gold in them thar hills…
December 20th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Interesting perspective on Google Knol. I hadn’t really thought about it’s impact on domaining. I do think that the pages on Knol will rank well and if you’re the expert on a particular knol, you can bank on it. However, just as you should not have your main business running off a blogspot.com or a typepad.com sub-domain, you don’t want your main website to be a Google Knol page. It’s important for a business to keep control of their website rather than have it in the control of a powerful third party.