Among the websites and services that went dark on Wednesday to protest the anti-piracy bills that are currently making their way through Congress, one of the more controversial is Wikipedia. A number of critics — including some regular contributors to the “open source” encyclopedia — say the site shouldn’t be taking an advocacy position on such an issue, since it’s supposed to represent a neutral point of view. But if anything, it could be argued that the internal process that led to that decision is actually a great illustration of how Wikipedia functions.

Among those criticizing the encyclopedia for its day-long blackout (which the Wall Street Journal said will affect more than 10 million users) was tech blogger Paul Carr, writing for the new site PandoDaily. In his post, Carr argued Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was right when he said blacking out a global business to protest a U.S. law is “foolish,” and Wikipedia was making a grave mistake by taking such a position, especially since the site just spent months trying to raise money from users to pay its bills:

[T]o shutter Wikipedia — a crowd-funded international encyclopedia — in protest of a single national issue is even worse. It’s idiotic, it’s selfish and it sets a horrible, horrible precedent.

Does Wikipedia have a duty to remain online?

Carr contends because Wikipedia is funded by its members and users, it owes the world “the courtesy of staying live, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” But his main point seems to be the same one other critics have made: Taking a position against a law like SOPA or PIPA (the former is the House version of the anti-piracy bill and the latter is the Senate version) is fundamentally at odds with Wikipedia’s stated goal of remaining neutral. This goal is spelled out in the site’s guidelines, which enforce what is known as the NPOV or “neutral point of view” in articles.

One editor for the site agreed, saying the blackout (which only affects the English portion of the site, and doesn’t affect the mobile version at all) put Wikipedia on “slippery slope,” which could force it to consider protests for all kinds of public issues. “Before we know it, we’re blacked out because we want to save the whales,” Robert Lawton told the Associated Press. Other users and contributors said they were concerned by taking a position on a specific issue, Wikipedia might call into question its neutral position on other things.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales, however, has said the two things are completely separate, and just because the articles themselves are supposed to be neutral on a particular issue doesn’t mean the Wikipedia community as a whole shouldn’t be able to make its opinions known about issues that affect the openness of the Internet:

@hakantee The encyclopedia will always be neutral. The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened!—
Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 17, 2012

The Wikipedia founder also pointed out it was not his decision to shut down the encyclopedia for a day, although much of the mainstream media coverage made it sound as though he had unilaterally made that choice. “This was a consensus decision of the community not mine alone,” he said in response to one critic on Twitter. In a note to the public, Sue Gardner — the executive director of Wikimedia, the non-profit foundation that administers the crowdsourced encyclopedia — also discussed the internal process that arrived at the decision, noting it was proposed by several administrators of the site, then voted on by members, the same way other choices are.

Wikipedia’s process was democratic, as it should be

After the site asked contributors and users for their thoughts about what action Wikipedia should take, more than 1,800 people responded and proposed a number of different approaches, including a global blackout and a blackout just for U.S. users (similar to Google, which blacked out its logo for U.S. IP addresses only). According to the protest’s chief proponents — who were identified only by Wikipedia handles such as User:Nuclear Warfare and User:Risker – the vote for a global blackout won by a slim majority of 55 percent. Advocates of that decision said since the legislation could affect global sites and services, protesting it should also be global.

Blogger and Cato Institute scholar Timothy Lee argued on Twitter that criticizing the Wikipedia decision (which SOPA’s congressional sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), also did — calling it “a publicity stunt”) shows a lack of understanding about how the user-generated encyclopedia works. While it is tempting to think of the site as a service like Twitter or Facebook, where a group of individuals control the company that offers the service and can take whatever action they wish, Wikipedia is run by a community. There are repeated criticisms about the “cabal” that governs the community, or about the influence Jimmy Wales has over it, but the principle it operates on is not in doubt.

As Megan Garber notes at The Atlantic, the discussion and debate around the decision is a fascinating glimpse into how this sprawling and somewhat anarchic global community of info-nerds functions. It may not be pretty, and it may not always work, but the SOPA and PIPA protest doesn’t highlight any of that — if anything, it does the exact opposite.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Klobetime and

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The statement also suggests that supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are preparing to go back on the offensive after a series of setbacks in the last week:

It is ironic that a website dedicated to providing information is spreading misinformation about the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social networking sites. This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts. Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy.

In a separate release, Smith said the House Judiciary Committee would go forward with a mark-up of the legislation in February.

Smith’s announcements are the latest twists in a months-long dust-up over a proposed law that would require internet companies like search engines and ad networks to help cut off so-called “rogue” foreign websites. Critics say the law is overreaching and will harm free speech and the architecture of the internet.

The bill appeared to be headed for defeat this weekend after the White House expressed doubt about its merits and Smith said he would remove controversial provisions involving internet domain names.

But on Monday, Wikipedia announced it would go forward with a rumored plan to “go dark” for 24 hours to protest the bills. But the blackout apparently does not extend to non-English Wikipedia sites. The blackout is slated to begin at midnight on Wednesday and will be joined by other sites popular with tech aficionados.

Wikipedia’s decision has already proved controversial. It’s unclear if the SOPA sponsors are treating Wikipedia’s move as a political opening to marshal support for the bill or if they planned to go forward all along.

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The announcement came via a series of Tweets this afternoon by Jimmy Wales, and was immediately picked up by Techmeme and others.

The move comes as a surprise because it appeared that SOPA opponents had succeeded in halting the controversial legislation. On Friday afternoon, Republican sponsors said they were removing key provisions of the bill and, on the weekend, the White House issued a statement suggesting it was withdrawing support.

SOPA supporters say the bill is needed to curtail “rogue” foreign websites but critics say it goes too far by tampering with the architecture of the internet and imposing China-style censorship. The debate has been characterized by fevered rhetoric on both sides, including by news baron Rupert Murdoch who this weekend tweeted “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.”

The Wikipedia announcement confirms the company is participating in the internet “black-out” that has been proposed for January 18th. Some began calling this the “nuclear option” following rumors that tech giants like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Facebook might participate.

If Wikipedia goes forward with the blackout, the SOPA debate is likely to expand beyond the tech and media sphere where it has percolated until now. Unlike other blackout proponents like Reddit which are largely the preserve of tech insiders, Wikipedia is read broadly by the general public. Wikipedia’s motives for going forward with the blackout are not entirely clear but it appears from Wales’ Twitter feed that he and others are worried the political halt is simply a tactical maneuver (see graphic below).

In other SOPA developments, influential tech publisher Tim O’Reilly explained his justifications for opposing the bill and the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) provided an analysis of the weekend’s political jostling.

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Wikipedia, which turns 10 years old this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. There has been repeated criticism of the site’s accuracy, of the so-called “cabal” of editors who decide which changes are accepted and which are not, and of founder Jimmy Wales and various aspects of his personal life and how he manages the non-profit service. But as a Pew Research report released today confirms, Wikipedia has become a crucial aspect of our online lives, and in many ways it has shown us — for better or worse — what all information online is in the process of becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic.

According to Pew’s research, 53 percent of American Internet users said they regularly look for information on Wikipedia, up from 36 percent of the same group the first time the research center asked the question in February of 2007. Usage by those under the age of 30 is even higher — more than 60 percent of that age group uses the site regularly, compared with just 33 percent of users 65 and older. Based on Pew’s other research, using Wikipedia is more popular than sending instant messages (which less than half of Internet users do), and is only a little less popular than using social networking services, which 61 percent of users do regularly.

The term “wiki” — just like the word “blog,” or the name “Google” for that matter — is one of those words that sounds so ridiculous it was hard to imagine anyone using it with a straight face when Wikipedia first emerged in the early 2000s. But despite a weird name and a confusing interface (which the site has been trying to improve to make it easier to edit things), Wikipedia took off and has become a powerhouse of “crowdsourcing,” before most people had even heard that word. In fact, the idea of a wiki has become so powerful that document-leaking organization WikiLeaks adopted the term even though (as many critics like to point out) it doesn’t really function as a wiki at all.

Most people will never edit a Wikipedia page — like most social media or interactive services, it follows the 90-9-1 rule, which states that 90 percent of users will simply consume the content, 9 percent or so will contribute regularly, and only about 1 percent will ever become dedicated contributors. But even with those kinds of numbers, the site has still seen more than 4 billion individual edits in its lifetime, and has more than 127,000 active users. Those include people like Simon Pulsifer, once known as “the king of Wikipedia” because he edited over 100,000 articles. Why? Because that was his idea of fun, as he explained to me at a web conference.

Yes, there will always be people who decide to edit the Natalie Portman page so that it says she is going to marry them, or create fictional pages about people they dislike. But the surprising thing isn’t that this happens — it’s how rarely it happens, and how quickly those errors are found and corrected.

With Twitter, we are starting to see how a Wikipedia-like approach to information scales even further. As events like the Giffords shooting take hold of the national consciousness, Twitter becomes a real-time news service that anyone can contribute to, and it gradually builds a picture of what has happened and what it means. Along the way, there are errors and all kinds of other noise — but over time, it produces a very real and human view of the news. Is it going to replace newspapers and television and other media? No, just as Wikipedia hasn’t replaced encyclopedias (although it has made them less relevant).

That is the way information works now, and for all their flaws, Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales were among the first to recognize that.

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Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says that despite widespread reports to the contrary, he is “not stepping down from anything,” and is maintaining his role with the user-edited encyclopedia, although he says he has voluntarily relinquished certain editing privileges he had as a co-founder of the site, after a disagreement with other Wikipedia editors. The dispute arose after Wales used his founder’s editing rights to remove a number of images from Wikimedia Commons — a related image-hosting service — that he felt were not appropriate, and that some critics said depicted child abuse and child pornography. Fox News reported that Wales’ deletion of the images led to a “shakeup at Wikipedia” and that the co-founder had been removed from having any ability to edit the site, but Wales called these reports “nonsense” in comments on Twitter, and expanded on those remarks in an email:

The Founder flag is a purely technical matter of little importance – which was precisely my reason for changing its rights – to eliminate an argument about it that wasn’t about what I regard as the core leadership values within our community. I have never led the community through authoritarian methods, and so when people started to focus on technical powers, I wanted to say clearly: not the point, folks.

Wales said that apart from dropping the founder’s editing privileges, which among other things allowed him to delete content without the consent of other editors, his role within Wikipedia today is “no different than it ever was” and that he is still actively editing articles just like any other user. Wales reiterated that he’s also still president of Wikia Inc. — a for-profit sister company — and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, and he still has special powers as the co-founder, including the ability to ban users and appoint members of the arbitration committee. When asked if he regretted deleting the images in question, Wales said: “I am proud to have put this issue on the table in a big way, and positive change will come from it – and already has, to a significant extent, though there is much work left to do.”

The Wikipedia community has come under fire recently from co-founder Larry Sanger over some of the images hosted by the related Wikimedia site (both are run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation). Sanger, who has fought with Wikipedia in the past and also started a competitor called Citizendium, says the images constitute child pornography, and he has written a letter to the FBI asking them to take action. That in turn sparked a series of reports on Fox News about Wikipedia hosting child porn.

One Wikipedia insider, who asked not to be identified, said that there was a heated debate about the way that Wales deleted the images, but that the issue has more or less died down, although discussion continues in a variety of Wikipedia forums and mailing lists about which (if any) images should be deleted, and what the site’s role should be in hosting either objectionable or potentially illegal content. This source said that while there are some critics both inside and outside the community, there is no debate about Jimmy’s ongoing role with the foundation or with Wikipedia itself.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In the history of modern media, it’s unlikely that anyone — at least, no one of similar size or scale — has embraced open principles more than Wikipedia. Co-founded by Jimmy Wales, the so-called “open-source encyclopedia” has grown to the point where it now encompasses 3.2 million articles, and is almost certainly far more influential than print-bound predecessors such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Although the site has a team of editors, known internally as “the cabal” (a wink to conspiracy theorists), and occasionally locks down contentious articles, the vast majority of the site is still open to anyone to edit.

As part of our ongoing series on the tension between “open” and “closed” across a range of industries and markets, I spoke to Wales via Skype from London. Our conversation follows, edited for clarity and length.

GigaOM: Where do you stand on the debate between open and closed standards? I’m assuming that given the nature of Wikipedia, you would probably come down on the open side.

Wales: Well, there are benefits and costs to both approaches, and a lot of those are well known at this point — although I do think that today, the open approach still isn’t as well understood as it should be, because it is a newer approach. There’s a big tendency to gravitate towards a closed and proprietary approach too easily, because it’s what [companies] know, it’s what they’re familiar with, and sometimes thinking up your business model in an open context is a lot harder. When you’ve got something closed and top-down and proprietary, you pretty much know what you’re going to do — you’re going to make something and then you’re going to put it in a box and sell it; and the box might be a downloadable box in the modern world, but it’s the same concept. Whereas with the open approach, it’s more about fostering an ecosystem and then making money in various other ways. What I would encourage people to do if they’re looking at doing something is to sort of step back and recognize the downsides of a proprietary approach.

GigaOM: Taking a more or less closed approach doesn’t seem to have hurt Apple — if anything, it seems to have succeeded more than anyone ever imagined, despite being closed. What are your thoughts on that?

Wales: If you look at the emerging competition between iPhone and Android, clearly the iPhone has the early edge, and of course Apple is quite good at what they do, their extreme controlling nature allows them to do certain things quite well. But at the same time, we’re seeing the beginning of a flood of new phones coming out from all kinds of different manufacturers…because of the open nature of the Android platform, and that’s going to pose a very interesting kind of competition. Google, in this instance, ironically, is more playing the Microsoft role here, to Apple’s Apple. One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they’re viewed as proprietary. But the truth is that compared to a lot of other companies, they really embraced a very open set of standards and had a very open platform, and it enabled them to gain dominance.

GigaOM: And what about the open approach when it comes to desktop software? Being open may have helped Microsoft in the early days, but it doesn’t seem to have helped Linux become competitive. Why?

Wales: One of the key pieces there for me is that there are some business models around Linux, but those business models — like Red Hat — have tended to focus on the server market, where certainly in the web-surfing world, the LAMP stack [Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP] is dominant. And it is dominant in that area in part because there emerged business models that made it possible for people to do things in a sustainable way, whereas Linux on the desktop so far hasn’t really generated a business model. If you think about Android, it can be open source, or very nearly open source, and that doesn’t hurt its chances of succeeding simply because Google has a business model around it that has nothing to do with selling the software. They can fund it, they can support it, and it makes business sense for them to do so, in a way that it has never made a lot of business sense for anybody to really spend the money to get Linux on the desktop to that kind of polished state.

GigaOM: So even if you are taking an open approach, you need to have a business model?

Wales: I’m not sure about the term business model, because if you think about Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a business model, but it’s not a business it’s a charity, and its business model — so to speak — is getting people to donate, because they love Wikipedia. So there isn’t a good buzzword for this, but you need a sustainability model; you need a model that brings in enough attention, revenue, whatever resources you need to make something happen in order to actually get it done. And what we’ve seen is that in open-source software, in some areas it’s worked and it’s great — so if you want a fabulous web server, and you want to scale up a web farm, the tools are free, they’re out there, there’s a whole ecosystem of developers, and it makes a lot of economic sense for people to participate in that ecosystem and it works. On the other hand, if you want to get your mom a laptop, I’m still not recommending Linux right now, because there hasn’t been an ecosystem, a sustainability ecosystem around making that happen in a really professional way.

GigaOM: There seems to be a belief that open systems are more free, but that they are also more chaotic and in some cases ugly, and that a closed approach like Apple’s works because it produces a uniform experience and high-quality design.

Wales: There’s definitely a lot of truth to that [but] at the same time, I don’t think it’s the whole story. We don’t have enough data points, really. We have Apple at one extreme and Linux at the other extreme, and Microsoft somewhere in the middle; so at one end you’ve got the highly controlled thing from a very controlling company that is obsessive about design; it’s proprietary, it’s top down, and it’s gorgeous, beautiful, elegant, simple design. And the open source thing is chaotic, hard, difficult, complicated — but also embodies a lot of amazing values, and it’s highly customizable, and really enjoyable if you like tinkering. You can do all kinds of things with it; it’s very powerful. We shouldn’t be too quick to judge the two. We can envision, for example, a proprietary system that is also complicated and difficult, but powerful because of the complicatedness and difficultness. But we can also imagine an open-source process that produces a really simple and clean design — I think probably Firefox is the best example.

GigaOM: And why did you decide that Wikipedia should be built on a completely open approach?

Wales: Nupedia (Wikipedia’s predecessor) was top-down and not very open — it was open source, but in terms of management it was centrally controlled. But it failed, because it wasn’t fun for the people who did it; it didn’t harness the passion of the individuals who were involved in that project. I think it’s fair to say that we couldn’t have built such a huge project with literally thousands of people without taking that kind of open approach — it just wouldn’t function. I suppose with a lot of money and time we could have created a traditional encyclopedia, but couldn’t have done this.

GigaOM: But Wikipedia has added controls to the system through the use of moderators and editors and so on, yes?

Wales: Yes, we’ve had to add some features like that. My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged. It’s a balance that you have to strike, where if you leave it alone then the trolls take over, but if you’re too central and controlling, then you can crush it, and we try to strike that balance.

GigaOM: I’m trying now to imagine what Wikipedia would be like if Steve Jobs ran it.

Wales: It would be interesting — it would probably be prettier, too.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Fabbio and Tony Duarte

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has joined the board of directors of Hunch, a New York-based startup that counts among its co-founders Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake. Hunch is one of the more important startups to emerge recently, yet it’s largely flown under the radar — much like Flickr did in the early days — despite its all-star founding team.

But back to Wales and his new director position. He outlines why he decided to join Hunch’s board in a blog post today:

I’ve always been intrigued by the potential intersection of community-based, user-generated web platforms and algorithmic, machine-based ones. Wikipedia and Wikia have proven to do a pretty darn good job with the former. Search engines clearly do a great job with the latter. But until recently I hadn’t seen a great example of how the two approaches could come together, co-exist and truly complement each other to form something greater than the sum of the parts – which I believe is the future of the web. Hunch.com’s combination of community-sourced content and algorithmically-driven smarts is forging a promising path towards this potential future.

Wales’ reasons are pretty similar to why Hunch is one of my favorite startups. At its very core, Hunch is a decision engine, but one that’s more sophisticated when compared to services such as Aardvark that offer answers to specific problems in a binary way. (Aardvark, by the way, is rumored to have received a $30 million acquisition offer from Google, which, if true, I think it should take, because as a service it will struggle to scale beyond a certain number of users.)

Hunch in a post on its own blog outlines its progress since its launch back in June:

• Hunch users have created more than 5,500 decisions.
• Hunch users have added more than 30,000 follow-up questions to those decisions.
• Hunch users have contributed more than 50,000 decision outcomes.
• Users have answered more than 28 million THAY (‘Teach Hunch About You’) questions.
• Users have ‘played’ more than 6 million decisions on Hunch.
• Hunch had more than 1 million unique visitors to the site in November.

Hunch (and companies like it) represent a smart way to deal with the increasing deluge of information on the web. Simply put, Hunch marries such information with your personal tastes to help you make choices. Using a decision tree structure, the site leads you through a series of questions, the answers to which help you uncover what decision you should ultimately make — whether it’s the next car you should drive or BBQ you should buy.

Caterina Fake

With the rise of the social web, “there’s an incredibly lush landscape of data that’s yet to be sorted,” Hunch Chief Product Officer Caterina Fake told me when I visited the company a few months ago. Caterina explained how in 2004, when Flickr was launched, many different trends converged to make the service a success: digital cameras had become commonplace, camera phones were on their way to entering the mainstream, broadband was becoming prevalent and blogging was hitting a new high.

She thinks a lot of different trends are coming together for Hunch as well, such as how people have gotten comfortable with the idea of sharing their personal information online, thanks to Facebook. (Remember the “25 Things About Me” craze on Facebook?). There is more trust in the collective knowledge shared on the web, thanks to Wikipedia. And most importantly, people are comfortable seeking answers from sites such as Mahalo and Yahoo Answers.

I see two big trends that favor Hunch: the pervasiveness of broadband and the explosion in the number of information-creation edge points, both of which are causing large amounts of information to flow into the web, challenging the search-based paradigm popularized by Google. For while Google can be the start of our quest for information, we need to augment it with services that bring the information to us.

In her recent post, All I Want for Christmas Is My Web, Stacey wished for a web that “comes to me on my phone, my navigation device, television or that fancy photo frame. It’s my web, delivering the information that it thinks I want, based on my preferences, friends and eventually location.” Well, Hunch is going to help her do that using a set of interesting algorithms including a “question selection algorithm.”

Indeed, as Fake explained, “We’re replacing calling friends and asking for her advice…we’re replacing human interaction, putting it online and making it easy to use instead of you going on to a search engine.” Hunch’s decision-based process makes it an efficient and targeted advertising platform. At the very least, the service can serve up ads for products that match the decisions people make.

For example, if someone uses Hunch to decide that a hybrid SUV should be their next car, the system could offer ads for car companies that sell hybrid SUVs. That’s what makes Hunch a lethal combination — one Jimmy Wales is glad he got behind.

Additional reporting by Jennifer Martinez.

Wales images courtesy of Wikipedia, Fake image courtesy of Duncan Davidson via Flickr.

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Wales says he didn’t create green Wikia so much to fulfill his passion for green living, but more to help deliver the truth of eco-info, which he says is sorely lacking: “I’m really passionate about having objective information in this area. It is really hard to get clear information on green issues.”

The site has six main, and pretty ambiguous, content areas: How To Guides, Go Local, The Green Movement, Sustainable Living, Environmental issues, and Green Science and technology. According to the site’s mission statement, Green Wikia is different from Wikipedia because it is focused on actionable items, more accessible to the average reader and written from a “green point of view.”

All the same qualms academics have with Wikipedia apply here, which could be especially dangerous for Green Wikia as so many seemingly cut-and-dry scientific conventions have been misconstrued in the public sphere. Meanwhile, corporate interests have mangled many a Wikipedia entry, like ExxonMobil editing the Valdez entry.

Beyond all the well-intentioned posturing, the site seems to abuse all the same old eco-buzz words and jargon. However, we’re waiting for the site to attract a tenacious user base eager to edit, amend and update. As purveyors of cleantech and “green”-related news, we know first-hand that Internet commenters have no fear of posting their eco-thoughts of varying veracity. Just make sure to check out the entry on “greenwashing” first.

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It is also a tactical admission by a company that believed that the machine was more powerful than the “human” that it isn’t the case. First, what are knols? Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering describes knols as …

…a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it….A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.

He goes on to extoll the virtues of authors, and how they need to be highlighted. This is a smackdown on Wikipedia, where the individual contributions remain part of the collective and are not the focus — and rightfully so. As Nick Carr writes,

For the past year, Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales has been doing a lot of trash-talking about taking on Google in the search business. Now Google’s striking back.

Whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen. Now if you think about it, the knol, despite its fancy name, is nothing but a classic move by a quasi-monopolist that wants to ensure it keeps getting the raw material (in this case, content on knols) for free, so that it can keep selling it at a premium. I stopped believing in Google’s “do no evil” ethos a long time ago, so that is why I am worried by comments this like from Manber:

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.

Which is to say that they won’t start making knols appear higher in the search results. Maybe it is the jet lag, but I don’t see knols as revolutionary as others are making them out to be. After all, you can set up a blog, make an expert page, maintain it and even put Google Ad Sense to monetize it. So how does this make knols special?

Sure there are APIs that allow knols to be shared with others, and Google maintains that it won’t give special weight to the knols, but who’s to know what they do inside their four walls. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who has the single best post on this subject, is a bit disconcerted by knols, it seems.

Google using its page rank system to its own benefit. Think of it this way: Google’s mysterious Page Rank system is what Internet Explorer was to Microsoft in the late 1990s: a way to control the destiny of others.

(Check out my interview with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia)

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Wales believes simplicity is key to building an intuitive social network website. Which is why sites like Wikipedia and Facebook work so well in the social community. With a recent Wikia-Facebook like screenshot making its way through the web, will Wikia become like Facebook? No. Wales explains that they are working on an open source free license search engine that could launch in December.

This was a fun conversation. You can download the show in HD, QuickTime, Windows Media or Xvid format.

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