Since its public launch September last year, there is virtually no traffic on Google’s Knol. And this could be a classic example of a failed startup from a giant like Google and this is serious because it counts towards their share’s spiral downward from $600 one year ago to $300 now which is 50% down. Economic meltdown does had a huge impact but its always of their own doing and there are not many who are criticizing their unnecessary adventures into almost every territory, from mails to social networking to content management and what not? I personally still believe in their culture of innovation but still they got to make some solid policy decisions. The forecast for online marketing – which is their only main revenue stream – is negative which should be alot alarming for all their future adventures.
So back to Knol. Compete stats show a very grim story. But they claim to have published 100,000th Knol yesterday but is it really still worth it? Knol claims to be a place for authentic authors to publish ‘authoritative’ work but how would they establish it with just voting and moderation and these simple tools? Wikipedia already offers this and now is the place of choice for virtually every writer. Knol’s idea wasn’t that bad though but if you’re a Internet Giant then I would expect something like ’semantic content management’ which will semantically select the reads which are most interesting for me on the basis of my past interaction across all their systems (Google Search, mail etc) just like they put targeted Ads and do so much research in putting targeted marketing.

Last Word: There were echoes of Wikipedia rival across the tech industry when Knol was launched just like their were cries of ‘A Windws Rival’ when Chrome was launched but I have now come to believe this as shortsightedness of those self proclaimed tech gurus who cannot see beyond the GUI!