Then I’m done for the day, I swear to FSM.
Duncan Riley of TechCrunch has an interesting article up about another move by Google to eat the entire word in one bite: Google Knol. This is basically an attempt by Google to recreate Wikipedia, only it allows authors of content to put ads on their pages and take a significant portion of the revenue. I’m not necessarily inclined to tremble every time Google announces a new initiative; as with many companies they have one really amazing hit and a bunch of other things that descend in quality and success from there. In this case it really feels like Wikipedia has such a solid head start that it will be difficult for another service to catch up, even if the authors are given a financial incentive. Wikipedia is also a fundamentally different entity– it really is about people coming together to share (and of course sometimes distort) what’s worth knowing in the world.