An adage today is that it is not about knowledge, it is about finding and filtering knowledge.
One of the ways to find and filter knowledge is to have someone authoritative do that and presents the result to you in a digestabe quanta of knowledge.
Knol, Squidoo and Wikipedia represent three such approach to presenting knowledge that you can turn to. Each with their interesting ideas and twists to it.
While surfing this afternoon, I first learned about Knol which reminds me of my post about Squidoo before. So I went on to explore closer to see how these user-generated-content sites differ.
Knol was launched not too long ago by Google with the aim of encouraging people to contribute knowledge. How to do that since other sites are also encouraging, even depending, on people to do that?
Google called the quanta, or in their term, unit of knowledge “knol“. The approach is to highlight the author instead of the content. In this way authors get recognition for what they write and there will be multiple articles on the same topic by different authors.
Google is smart to play on the on the idea of attention economy. How do one get people’s attention and motivate people to contribute? By offering a way to be an author and draws attention to themselves. On top of that, authors can also choose to earn revenue by allowing Google to serve ads.
Squidoo has a very similar idea to Knol. Launched earlier than Knol, Squidoo also encourage user to create pages of information which they termed as Lenses.
A lens is, as described by Squidoo, one person’s look at something online.
Beside just textual content, Squidoo provides modules to pull images, videos, books, links, rss, maps, together into a single page.
Squidoo’s approach applies the ideas of meshup that became prevalent in this web 2.0 era. Taking peices and reassemble them into new distilled infromation.
I tried some Lenses on Squidoo when it started but soon lost interest.
Wikipedia is the well-known site that allows many of us to dump the volumes of encyclopedia sitting on the book shelf collecting dust.
The idea of collecting and filtering knowledge is an old one, dating even before the first encyclopedia was published or the term coined.
Wikipedia puts the collective of the web to work. The idea was deem counter-intuitive to begin with but it succeed in putting together the largest volume of knowledge available.
Though Wikipedia does has its many criticism, it is still my first source of choice when seeking all kinds of knowledge.
Whether it is Knol or Squidoo or Wikipedia (as I found out later also Hubpages or Helium), they are all competiting for the attention of the knowledge seekers as well as the providers.
Also, in order to be useful they had to be around for the user. Which means they have to survive, whether through posting ads or asking for donation.
Which model would succeed?
Do you use these sites to learn a new knowledge?
Do you know of any smilar approach to find and filtering knowledge? Please share with me in the comment.
I use squidoo to promote my new blog, affiliate
Honestly, I’m not active in any of the three. If I were to choose any for my source of knowledge, I’d opt for Wiki and it’s packed with unbiased information; pretty much everything and anything under the sky.
Yan