Betting Against Google’s Answer to Wikipedia

in Google | December 12th, 2007

As many now know, Google announced Fri­day that it’s test­ing a new con­tent ini­tia­tive — dubbed “knol” — that it hopes will rival Wikipedia. Real­iz­ing that Wikipedia entries rank first on 27% of all Google search result pages, the folks at Google­plex could­n’t resist launch­ing a com­pet­i­tive prod­uct. In announc­ing “knol,” the com­pa­ny high­light­ed two prob­lems that this new con­tent prod­uct will address:

1) “There are mil­lions of peo­ple who pos­sess use­ful knowl­edge that they would love to share,” but they don’t share that knowl­edge “because it is not easy enough to do that.”

2) “The key idea behind the knol project is to high­light authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cov­er, news arti­cles have bylines, sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles always have authors — but some­how the web evolved with­out a strong stan­dard to keep authors names high­light­ed. We believe that know­ing who wrote what will sig­nif­i­cant­ly help users make bet­ter use of web con­tent.”

How “knol” attempts to solve these prob­lems is fair­ly straight­for­ward. It will pro­vide experts with user-friend­ly tem­plates for writ­ing and pub­lish­ing ency­clo­pe­dia entries (or “knols”) on the web. And since a pic­ture is appar­ent­ly worth a thou­sand words, I rec­om­mend that you take a look at a sam­ple screen­shot here. Depart­ing from Wikipedia, Google’s project will cater to the indi­vid­ual author, not com­mu­ni­ties of authors. And it will encour­age many ency­clo­pe­dia entries on the same top­ic, as opposed to one uni­fied text. Google then assumes that the cream will rise to the top. If 20 peo­ple craft “knols” on “string the­o­ry,” then the best one — pre­sum­ably the one that gets the most links from qual­i­ty sites — will rise high­est in the search rank­ings.

Google’s con­cept is not alto­geth­er bad. But it’s also one of the more ordi­nary ideas to come out of Moun­tain View, and I’m guess­ing that the results will fall short of cor­po­rate expec­ta­tions. Here’s why:

Most fun­da­men­tal­ly, the infor­ma­tion gen­er­at­ed by these “knols” will be sub­stan­dard com­pared to what you’ll find on Wikipedia. Although the screen­shot pro­vid­ed by Google nice­ly fea­tured a Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar writ­ing on “Insom­nia,” the real­i­ty is that few experts of this stature will take the time to con­tribute. Take my word for it. I’ve spent the past five years try­ing to get schol­ars from elite uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, to bring their ideas to the out­side world, and it’s often not their first pri­or­i­ty. They just have too many oth­er things com­pet­ing for their time. More often than not, Google’s knols will be writ­ten by authors with less­er, if not dubi­ous, cre­den­tials. The mediocre entries will be many; the great ones, few. And this will leave Google’s con­tent in a weak­er posi­tion rel­a­tive to Wikipedia.

To be clear, Wikipedi­a’s over­all tal­ent pool may not be much bet­ter. But Wikipedi­a’s mod­el has an impor­tant built-in advan­tage. A com­mu­ni­ty of writ­ers focus­ing on the same text will cor­rect one anoth­er and improve the over­all prod­uct over time. The final text becomes greater than the sum of its authors. Mean­while, Google’s mod­el, which will pro­duce a pro­lif­er­a­tion of lack­lus­ter entries on the same sub­ject, does­n’t include any kind of strong self-cor­rect­ing mech­a­nism that will improve the entries. The com­pa­ny seems to think that user feed­back, name recog­ni­tion, and a share of ad rev­enue (which prob­a­bly won’t amount to much) will do the trick. But that seems like wish­ful think­ing, and I’m bas­ing that on sev­er­al years of work­ing at About.com, which inte­grat­ed many of the same ele­ments into its mod­el. Strike one against Google.

If you’re look­ing for Strikes 2 and 3, let me out­line them briefly.

Strike 2 comes down to false premis­es: When you step back and exam­ine Google’s rea­sons for cre­at­ing project “knol,” they don’t hold up to scruti­ny. These days, pub­lish­ing on the web is fair­ly dum­my proof. Free blog­ging soft­ware, Google Page Cre­ator, Yahoo’s Geoc­i­ties and Wikipedia — these tools have made it incred­i­bly easy to pub­lish to the web. (Some­how, writ­ers have fig­ured out how to post 2,125,453 arti­cles to Wikipedia.) The argu­ment that tech­nol­o­gy is hold­ing back would-be ency­clo­pe­dia writ­ers just does­n’t fly. Nor does the notion that we’d get bet­ter qual­i­ty ency­clo­pe­dia entries if only authors could attach their names to what they write. On the one hand, anonymi­ty has­n’t slowed down Wikipedia at all. On the oth­er, many legit­i­mate experts will see writ­ing “knols” as being a slight step above “van­i­ty” pub­lish­ing, but not much more. In short, not a good use of their time.

Strike 3 turns on momen­tum and the lack of game-chang­ing func­tion­al­i­ty: Not long after YouTube launched and proved the via­bil­i­ty of video shar­ing, Google cre­at­ed its own com­pet­i­tive unit, Google Video. By the next year, Google real­ized it would nev­er catch up and bought YouTube for $1.65 bil­lion. Wikipedia, in com­par­i­son, has had a much longer head start. For six years, it has been refin­ing its mod­el, grow­ing traf­fic, and gain­ing user loy­al­ty. That’s a sub­stan­tial and most like­ly insur­mount­able lead. True, once upon a time a young Google came out of nowhere and knocked an estab­lished Yahoo out of its lead­er­ship role. But that hap­pened when Google brought its game-chang­ing search tech­nol­o­gy to mar­ket. With “knol,” how­ev­er, there’s no such game-chang­ing tech­nol­o­gy on dis­play — noth­ing that sub­stan­tial­ly changes how knowl­edge gets cre­at­ed. Google and its engi­neers cer­tain­ly excel at man­ag­ing knowl­edge and pro­duce many great prod­ucts (for which I’m per­son­al­ly thank­ful). But get­ting into the knowl­edge cre­ation busi­ness may pose new chal­lenges, ones that will require the Google staff to go beyond algo­rithms and think­ing in terms of 0s and 1s.

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Nobel Prize Winners on YouTube

in Video - Politics/Society | December 10th, 2007

YouTube gets smarter one painful­ly small step at a time. First cours­es from Berke­ley; next videos of Nobel Prize win­ners.  More com­ing?

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Coppola is Back

in Film | December 9th, 2007

Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, the direc­tor who brought us The God­fa­ther and Apoc­a­lypse Now, has released his first film in a decade. Based on a novel­la by Mircea Eli­ade, a Roman­ian thinker prin­ci­pal­ly known for his work on the his­to­ry of reli­gion, “Youth With­out Youth” fea­tures Tim Roth play­ing the role of Dominic Matei, an elder­ly lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor, who gets struck by light­ning and finds his youth strange­ly restored. To pub­li­cize the film, Cop­po­la has been doing a fair amount of press in New York. (The film is pre­mier­ing there.) Here, you can lis­ten to the inter­view he gave on WNY­C’s Leonard Lopate Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). We’ve also post­ed below a video out­take from the inter­view. Final­ly, this Q&A ses­sion in The New York Post may also be of inter­est.

Relat­ed Posts:

• The God­fa­ther With­out Bran­do?: It Almost Hap­pened
• Land­mark Moments in Film: Apoc­a­lypse Now

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The 53 Places to Go in 2008

in Uncategorized | December 9th, 2007

Cour­tesy of The New York Times.

Know of any pod­casts or videos that we should fea­ture on Open Cul­ture? Email us your tips.

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JFK in 1960, Romney in 2007 — Religion in America

in Religion, Video - Politics/Society | December 6th, 2007

Mitt Rom­ney, a Mor­mon, looked yes­ter­day to set aside lin­ger­ing con­cerns about his reli­gion in a high­ly pub­li­cized speech. Imme­di­ate­ly, the speech revived mem­o­ries of John F. Kennedy’s attempt, dur­ing the 1960 cam­paign, to ease con­cerns about his Catholi­cism. We’ve post­ed both speech­es below. The sim­i­lar­i­ties are there. But the dif­fer­ences are more pro­found. I’ll resist the temp­ta­tion to point them out. You can watch the clips and draw your own con­clu­sions.

John F. Kennedy — 1960

Mitt Rom­ney — 2007

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Agatha Christie Radio Mysteries

in Audio Books, Media | December 5th, 2007

Pod­cast­ing is a new form of media dis­tri­b­u­tion that’s done a good job of reviv­ing old forms of media, par­tic­u­lar­ly old radio shows. In the past, we’ve point­ed you to sev­er­al old radio broad­casts, includ­ing Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio dra­ma that led many Amer­i­cans to hun­ker down in base­ments, des­per­ate­ly hop­ing to avoid an unfold­ing mar­t­ian inva­sion. Today, we’re high­light­ing a vin­tage radio col­lec­tion (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) that fea­tures drama­ti­za­tions of mys­ter­ies writ­ten by Agatha Christie, the ‘Queen of Crime.’ Here, at your leisure, you can lis­ten to the adven­tures of Her­cule Poirot, the fic­tion­al Bel­gian detec­tive who appeared through­out much of her writ­ing. To be pre­cise, he fig­ured into 33 of her nov­els, and 54 of her short sto­ries. Right now, you can access 27 indi­vid­ual record­ings of Christie’s work, and there’s seem­ing­ly more to come.

In the mean­time, if you’re look­ing for more old time media, I’d encour­age you to vis­it this pro­duc­er’s larg­er col­lec­tion of pod­casts on iTunes. Among oth­er things, you’ll find revived pro­duc­tions of Abbott & Costel­lo, Jack Ben­ny, Flash Gor­don and more.

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Favorite Books of the Year

in Books | December 5th, 2007

The rou­tine is always the same here in the Bay Area. Wake up, get in the car, lis­ten to Forum on KQED. Today, the host Michael Kras­ny invit­ed lis­ten­ers to call in and pick the best books of the year, or those they plan to give as gifts this hol­i­day sea­son. To get some good reading/gift tips, you can lis­ten here (iTunes — Feed — MP3) or sim­ply read the print­ed list here. (Forum can be found in our col­lec­tion of Ideas & Cul­ture Pod­casts.)

Also, in case you missed them, you may want to review these recent selec­tions by The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2007 and The 10 Best Books of 2007.

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Learning Foreign Languages the Mango Way

in English Language, Language Lessons | December 4th, 2007

What’s an easy way to learn a new lan­guage at no cost, when­ev­er and wher­ev­er you want? One is to take advan­tage of our exten­sive col­lec­tion of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons. Anoth­er is to check out Man­go Lan­guages, a web site that offers free online lan­guage cours­es that will teach you the basics in French, Ger­man, Eng­lish, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Man­darin Chi­nese, Japan­ese and more.

We’d usu­al­ly out­line the pros and cons of learn­ing lan­guages the Man­go Way. But there’s no rea­son to rein­vent the wheel. So we’re direct­ing your atten­tion to Jon Gor­don, the host of Future Tense, whose recent broad­cast took a short look at Man­go’s offer­ing. You can lis­ten to it here (MP3 — RealAu­dio — Feed) and read some more here. You can also access Future Tense on iTunes.

NOTE: To get start­ed with Man­go Lan­guages, you will need to reg­is­ter with the web­site.

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The 20 Best iPod Utilities

in Podcasts, Web/Tech | December 4th, 2007

Life­hack­er has assem­bled a great list that will help you max­i­mize the use of your iPod. Here, they point you to free soft­ware that will let you 1) rip a DVD to your iPod, 2) copy music and videos to and from your iPod, and also from and to any com­put­er, 3) load videos (and par­tic­u­lar­ly YouTube videos) to you iPod, 4) put Wikipedia on your iPod, 5) free your­self from using iTunes, 6) back­up your iPod, etc.

Check out the full list here and learn to make your iPod a bet­ter learning/entertainment tool.

PS: A very sim­i­lar list of iPod tips was pub­lished a few days ago over at Pachecus.com, and they were kind of enough to include a link to one of our old fea­tures. Have a look here too.

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James Joyce’s Dubliners: Four Stories

in Audio Books, Literature | December 2nd, 2007

Back in June, we high­light­ed the release of James Joyce’s Ulysses in free audio­book for­mat. Ulysses stands as Joyce’s most impor­tant work, and for some, it’s most the impor­tant work pub­lished in the Eng­lish lan­guage dur­ing the entire 20th cen­tu­ry. Despite Ulysses’ enor­mous stature, many read­ers still turn to Dublin­ers, a col­lec­tion of 15 short sto­ries that Joyce pub­lished in 1914, part­ly because it’s con­sid­ered his most acces­si­ble writ­ing. Over at Lib­rivox, you can find sev­er­al key sto­ries from this col­lec­tion — name­ly, The Sis­ters (mp3), Ara­by (mp3), Eve­line (mp3), and The Dead (mp3 in zip file). The Dead is the longest and last sto­ry in the col­lec­tion, and it’s a Christ­mas sto­ry, some say the “great­est of all Christ­mas sto­ries,” which makes it par­tic­u­lar­ly time­ly to men­tion here.

It’s worth not­ing that you can down­load the com­plete etext of Dublin­ers at Project Guten­berg or on Google Book Search. (The lat­ter ver­sion is clean­er.) And, if you can suf­fer through it, Guten­berg also offers a free audio ver­sion of Joyce’s text, which is read by a com­put­er, not a real per­son.

Last­ly, be sure to spend some time perus­ing Lib­rivox’s entire col­lec­tion of free audio­books. It’s the best on the web.

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