Google's Knol Poses a Threat to Mahalo

post from Internet Sector and Stocks Analysis from Seeking Alpha on 24 July 2008 06:13:08 AM. © Internet Sector and Stocks Analysis from Seeking Alpha

Mathew Ingram submits:

About six months after first announcing a private beta test of its Knol project, Google (GOOG) has thrown the doors open, and is inviting anyone who wants to create an entry to jump on board. Unlike Wikipedia — to which it is most often compared — Google’s Knol allows authors to effectively take ownership of articles they write about topics in which they are (or believe themselves to be) experts. And instead of there just being one article on a subject, to which multiple authors contribute, Google says that it expects there to be multiple entries about a given topic, written by different people. Contributors can also offer their own edits to a particular article, which the author can choose to accept or not.

Obviously, a user-generated compendium of knowledge about a variety of topics sounds a lot like a little thing called Wikipedia, and there’s no question that Knol is going to compete with the crowd-sourced encyclopedia to some extent (Wikipedia has also been considering the addition of an “approval system,” which would make it even more like Knol). But I think Knol poses an even bigger threat to Mahalo, the people-powered search service created by Jason Calacanis — and to a lesser extent other directory-style tools like Seth Godin’s Squidoo and About.com (owned by the New York Times (NYT)), not to mention Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s Citizendium project.

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