Google finally launched Knol today, like many other websites we are talking about a large content play.  To some extent, a concept pioneered by About.com and refined by Wikipedia and Mahalo. Authoritative users creating rich indexes of curated content.

In their battles for king of hill, they have all bowed to the same master in the form of Google. So now with Knol the game has changed a bit, after all the big G is the one sending most of the traffic to all these destinations. With Google, content web sites ride the millions of users who come in through just the right keyword. Higher on the hill search results page, the higher your traffic (also known as value).

So while yes there are a few questions, such as how will Google rank and integrate Knol pages into their search results? What about Google Adsense on Knol pages? One can’t help but feel like a bee trapped in someone else’s honey pot.

However I think Knol is not going to be major problem for others in the market. Lets take a look why.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Their index is simply too large and well placed in Google. Sure there is going to be more issues over the content, but that’s also what makes it great. Worst case, the openness and inaccuracies make it laughable like your local evening news. However a shit load of people still watch the local evening news and love it.

Mahalo

Mahalo is also going to do just fine. In fact there is going to be many more that take a similar approach to Mahalo. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery as they say. Having copycats in the market is also good, it means you are doing something right. Mahalo can also beat both Wikipedia and Knol in some areas simply because they will build out pages the others wont. Watch Google Trends for a bit sometime, you’ll find the majority users are more interested in their latest celebrity news as opposed to an authoritative article on a clogged toilet.

You

Yes you! Do you blog our create content online? Yes you’ll be OK too. In fact, you should be on Knol now creating content there. You can even generate adsense revenue within your pages, why let the these guys have all the fun? Better yet, create you own content portal, something under a very fine niche. Dominate the space and start chipping at these big guys for traffic (once again, value).

Whats others are saying:

• Danny Sullivian’s great roundup
  (if you read only one knol post this year…)
• Allen manages to record a video under 5 minutes!
• Jason on FriendFeed
• Matthew says aloha
• Graywolf is literally foaming at the mouth

As I blogged about last week, Mahalo guide notes are now open for public editing. The guide notes are the small write ups for each topic that appear along the right hand side of the page. Lately we’ve expanded over 15,000 of our pages to include more content (200-500 worlds) and additional subsections. The result is very much a Google/Wikipedia mashup with only the best and most relevant content showcased.

Jason blogged about this earlier today toting it as Wikipedia 3.0. He points out that you can even edit your own (or your companies page) as well. This can be a beyond frustrating experience on Wikipedia as I’m sure many of you already know.

Ryan Spoon also had a few thoughts on accountability and transparency. Both are something we discuss heavily when thinking about the future of Mahalo.

To get started simply login and look for the link in the bottom of any guide note as seen to the right. To insure quality updates every change will be monitored by our staff. The hope is we can add that all important layer of public participation without sacrificing quality and of course accuracy.

We have also made our internal activity page public. Here you can see everything coming into Mahalo and how it was handled.

Please let me know your thoughts and feedback on this in the comments.

Jason is down in Australia this week for CeBIT and just dropped an announcement about something we’ve been working on lately. Since I started at Mahalo I’ve typically recieved the same two questions over and over again:

1. Is it really crazy to work for Jason?
   and
2. How do you plan to scale?

Of course the first answer is yes, and the second a bit more complicated. One of the techniques is naturally going to be pulling resources from the public at large. Soon every guide note (the 200+ word write up on each page) will be editable to the public. This means users who are an authority on a subject (or just passionate about it) can add even more than just their favorite links.

Now we have to look at services like Wikipedia even closer to see how to manage something like this. Mostly to learn what not to do. I’ve always been a huge opponent of the “anonymous questionable librarian like army” that rules Wikipedia. To create quality content you need some type of editorial layer (if not multiple). So we have dedicated staff to oversee every edit that comes in to verify data when necessary. We need to constantly address the issue of bias content but avoid the lame edit wars. All while doing it as transparent and fair as human-poweredly possible.

What are your thoughts?