Google to Wikipedia: "Knol" thine enemy

Google has surely noticed that much of its search traffic is directed to Wikipedia, which regularly has an entry in the top five search results for any particular term. If Google could steer all that traffic toward its own properties instead, and if those properties contained Google ads, and if Google split its revenue with the article creators... well, it's not hard to see why this would start to look pretty good to both Google and content creators, and why such an initiative could ramp up quickly.

Udi Manber, Google's VP of Engineering, announced just such a plan last night, a program that (in his words) will make it easier for those with knowledge to share it with the world. The system is called "Knol"—which refers to a "knowledge unit"—and it will let anyone create, edit, and profit from creating a page packed with information on a specific topic. In other words, Google doesn't just want to link Wikipedia, it wants to be Wikipedia.

For a company that got its start by bowing at the Altar of the Algorithm, bringing human-created content in-house is the most recent manifestation of a paradigm shift that has been in the works for the last few years now, one that hasn't been happening without controversy. With the announcement of Knol, Google is already inviting questions about whether its reach has now extended too far.

Land of the knols


The basic point behind the knol system is to highlight (and provide incentives for) authors—a direct shot at the anonymity of Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 systems that don't allow experts to stress their own credentials when posting.

Each knol (it's the name of both the pages and the service) is just a web page hosted by Google. It has a special layout, one generated by Google-supplied tools, that includes content, links, and an author biography.
Google will host the content but will not attempt to edit or verify it, instead trusting that the best knols will naturally rise to the top (a single topic can have multiple knols, each competing for higher placement in Google's search results.)

Essentially, Google is offering to let people rebuild Wikipedia, and it seems to be targeting two classes of users: 1) experts who may not all feel welcome in Wikipedia, where their actions carry no special weight, and 2) those who aren't keen on spending their free time contributing to Wikipedia without compensation. While Wikipedia itself is diverse enough to survive, smaller projects like Citizendium could find the going much tougher.

You say you want a revolution? Well...

The Knol project is, in one sense, as nonrevolutionary as they come. Making information pages simple to develop? Ranking those pages? Monetizing those pages? Google itself does all three things already on the web through tools like Blogger, Google Search, and AdSense. Essentially, Google is just rolling out a new set of web page creation tools with a single template to work on.

Google's professed interest in making it easy for people to put information on this thing called "the Internet" might have rung true in 1998, but that simply can't be the reason for Knol in 2007. It's already too easy. Wikipedia makes it simple. So do blogging tools.

Instead, Google wants to mount a direct challenge to various social knowledge sites. Although it won't have an exclusive license to the content created for Knol, and though it will offer Knol pages to be indexed by all search engines, it's clear that Google really wants to be in control of a vast, Wikipedia/Citizendium knowledge store. And it can offer something that Wikipedia, et al., cannot: cash.

AdSense and its discontents

The revenue sharing bit is one of the keys to the whole project. Google is going to let authors choose if they want to include Google ads on their knols. The truly altruistic might say no. Most people will say yes.

And that's where things could get ugly. The lure of filthy lucre is likely to force several changes on the community model of current social knowledge projects. For one, it will break the community-oriented, we're-all-working-on-this-together spirit of sites like Wikipedia. With Knol, we're not in this together; we're in competition. Writing a knol on a popular topic could become a cash cow, as Google promises to split ad revenue with the author.

Many different authors can take a shot at creating a knol on the same topic, which should allow the best pages to claw their way to the top in a sort of survival of the fittest. But the thing about intellectual Darwinism is that it can be vicious, and we expect the same to be true of competition for the top knol spots.

Will Google be the one to police the inevitable claims of plagiarism? Will it do anything when a knol rips off pictures from another knol? What happens when Wikipedia gets ripped off or rewritten? Google is famously loathe to intervene manually, but when the company is creating an ecosystem that rewards individuals and puts so much cash on the table, problems are sure to result.

Maybe Google can be evil

The blogosphere reaction has already been electric. Even those likely to give Google the benefit of the doubt when it comes to not being evil are having second thoughts. What possible reason does the company have for moving beyond indexing and into the hosting and control of this sort of content?

Actually, Google has been making these moves for years. Google Book Search, Google Video, and YouTube are only the highest-profile examples of the way that Google has moved far beyond its roots in pointing people to other places on the 'Net.

Social knowledge, as exemplified by the high search placement of Wikipedia articles and the growth of sites like Mahalo, has been high-profile for long enough to earn a spot on the Google strategic radar screen. Despite the idealistic sentiments about ease of knowledge production, Knol looks more like an attempt to kneecap various sites that now command a good chunk of Google's outgoing search result links.

With Google having a vested interest in knols, but also being the main search engine that will index and rank those links, many people already suspect a conflict of interest. While we suspect Google will be careful not to give a special boost to knol results (at the risk of ruining user confidence in its results), others aren't so sure. At the very least, it will create suspicion.

Om Malik argues that this is just "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."

TechCrunch wonders if this is "a step too far." Knol "brings the power of Google into a marketplace that is already rich with competition," writes Duncan Riley, "and a marketplace where Google can use its might to crush that competition by favoring pages from Knol over others, on what is the world's most popular search engine."

And Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land says, "It begins to feel like the knowledge aggregators are going to push out anyone publishing knowledge outside such aggregation systems."

This can't be the reaction that Google was hoping for with its announcement, but it may not matter. The naysayers can do their naysaying, but we suspect that the prospect of cash, combined with the competition for top spots in the Knol hierarchy, will lead to plenty of quality content at a rapid clip. Whether that's a positive development for the web is another question.

Google Knol : A step too far?

News broke late yesterday that Google was preparing to launch a new site call Knol that will combine parts of Wikipedia and Squidoo to create a new user generated authoritative online knowledgebase of everything.

All the details aren’t fully clear yet. What we do know is that Google will offer a revenue share from each page: “If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads,” although we don’t know at this stage how much. We know that unlike Squidoo or other sites who offer a percentage share of advertising revenue, Knol cuts out the middle man. Think of it this way; presuming Google normally splits 50% (no one knows the exact number, at it changes at different levels) of revenue from an Adsense unit with a normal publisher, in the case of someone like Squidoo or even a blog with writers writing on a rev share model they then get a percentage of the 50%; Knol on the other hand could offer a proper 50% of the actual original cost of the ad, not a percentage of the percentage: that is not only a great big advantage, it’s also verging on unfair competition.

One of the recurring themes in the comments on the earlier post and in discussions I’ve had on Twitter and elsewhere since the announcement is that people are already questioning whether this is a step too far for Google. As Paul Short said in a comment:

Is anyone else seeing a shift in the way Google is doing things? I’m seeing a company whose core product relied on aggregating and sifting content from other sites, to a move to them building (or buying) content (or the underlying technology) that they have ultimate control over.

He’s right. Google is moving away from simply indexing the worlds content to being a content provider itself. Of course Google in response would argue that it is simply facilitating user generated content (like with Blogger), that ultimately they are the host as opposed to the creator, but it still competes with existing content providers, many of whom rely on Google search results for their living. Which takes us to question of search results.

Google has already said that Knol results will be in Google’s index, presumably on the first page, and very possibly at the top: “Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.” Google wants Knol to be an authoritative page: “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” and that’s a direct challenge to Wikipedia. Some TechCrunch commenters have suggested that this might be the end of Wikipedia, but that’s a fanciful proposition. Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere, but having said that they do rely on Google for a good portion of their traffic. If Wikipedia is replaced in the first few results on Google with pages from Knol, Wikipedia traffic will decrease, and possibly as a consequence so will broader participation on Wikipedia.

I’ve long since subscribed to the “Google is my lord and savior” argument and gave up caring about privacy and other such things years ago, but Knol moves into new territory. Moves by Google into mobile phones with Android and the bid for mobile spectrum in the United States should be welcomed, because they bring new competition into a traditional market; likewise Google’s attempts to break into radio and TV advertising. Knol on the other hand brings the power of Google into a marketplace that is already rich with competition, and a marketplace where Google can use its might to crush that competition by favoring pages from Knol over others, on what is the worlds most popular search engine.

One Laptop Per Child

The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC) is a Delaware, USA based, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, set up to oversee The Children's Machine project and the construction of the XO-1 "$100 laptop". Both the project and the organization were announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005. According to the home page of the project's wiki at laptop.org, "OLPC espouses five core principles: (1) child ownership; (2) low ages; (3) saturation; (4) connection; and (5) free and open source."

OLPC is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, Red Hat, and most recently Intel[2]. Each company has donated two million dollars.

The organization is chaired by Nicholas Negroponte and its CTO is Mary Lou Jepsen. Other principals of the company include former MIT Media Lab director Walter Bender, who is President of OLPC Software and Content, and Jim Gettys, Vice-President of Software Engineering.

Glossary of some important terms

AAC
Advanced Audio Coding - an audio encoding/compression scheme popularizes by Apple Computers' iTunes. Based on a lossy-compression algorithm, it is believed that the technology achieves better sound quality than the MP3 format when compared at the same bit rate.
AMOLED
Active-matrix Organic Light-Emitting-Diode - a "successor" to the LCD technology. It is considered superior due to its emissive nature, creating its own light rather than relying on modulating a backlight. The technology also offers much wider viewing angle than the LCD counterpart.
In 2003, the first consumer-grade AMOLED display was integrated into the Kodak EasyShare LS633 digital zoom camera, offering a resolution 512 x 218 pixels.
ATSC
Advanced Television Systems Committee - the group that oversees the ATSC digital television standard for the United States. This high-definition TV standard will be replacing the existing NTSC system, providing a video resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and digital audio output using Dolby Digital AC-3.
codec
A hardware or software device used to encode or decode a digital data stream. The term was originated from a combination of the terms "[en]COde" and "DECode".
DVI
Digital Visual Interface - a digital video technology for delivering uncompressed video stream to display devices such as LCD monitor and digital projectors.
It supports resolutions up to 1920x1200 @ 60Hz in single-link mode and 2560x1600 @ 60Hz in dual-link mode.
EDGE
Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (also known as EGPRS) is a mobile data transmission technology deployed on GSM networks. It provides higher rate of data transmission speed and improved reliability over the GPRS network that came before it. Currently operating at 236.8kbps, the technology is often classified at 2.75G. Its speed is still no match to its CDMA counterpart, EV-DO, which operates at 4.9 Megabits/second.
EV-DO
Evolution Data-Optimized = high-speed mobile data standard used by CDMA=based networks, originally developed by Qualcomm. Operating at the top speed of 4.9 Megabits/second (rev. B), the technology is significantly faster the EDGE technology deployed on the GSM network. However, the technology is no match when compared against the up and coming HSDPA standard, which can potentially operate at 14.4 Megabits/second.
GPRS
General Packet Radio Service - mobile data service for GSM phones. It is used as the underlying technology for WAP, SMS, MMS and other Internet-related services such as web browsing and email.
GSM
Groupe Spécial Mobile or Global System for Mobile Communication is the most widely-used 2G mobile standard in the world. Used by more than 2 billion people in 212 countries and territories, the GSM standard allows international roaming very common between operators.
HDCP
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection is a form of Digital Rights Management protection scheme developed by Intel that controls copyrighted media as it travels through DVI (Digital Visual Interface) or HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) connections.
HDMI
High-Definition Multimedia Interface - a digital audio/video interface typically used to transmit uncompressed data stream between any audio/video source such as DVD Player, A/V receiver, and set-top box. It essentially combines the DVI standard for video with the multi-channel digital audio standard.
HSDPA
High-Speed Downlink Packet Access - 3G mobile telephony protocol capable of transmitting at 14.4 Mbit/second, though the current top deployment speed is 7.2 Mbit/second. It is currently available in 39 countries on 64 networks.
MP3
MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 - digital audio encoding format that utilizes a lossy-compression algorithm to significanly reduce the amount of data representing the original audio data. Developed by engineers from Philips, CCET, IRT and Fraunhofer Society, the underlying algorithm removes the sound frequencies that cannot be heard by human ears.
Ogg
An open standard container format for media files whose standards are maintained by Xiph.Org Foundation. Though a .ogg file extension maybe of any Ogg media type (audio/video/subtitle), it is often used to refer to the audio format Ogg Vobis, a Vorbis-encoded audio enveloped inside an Ogg container.
sone
A unit of perceived loudness for an average listener, proposed by S. Smith Stevens in 1936. It is equal to a 1000-hertz sound with an intensity of 40 decibels above the listener's threshold of hearing.
UMTS
Universal Mobile Telecommunications System - a 3G mobile phone technology designed to be the successor of the GSM standard. The most common form of the technology uses W-CDMA as the underlying air interface. However, with the HSDPA interface, it can achieve data transfer speed of up to 14.4 Mbit/s.
WWDC
Apple Worldwide Developers Conference - an event held annually by Apple Inc. specifically for software developers on the Mac platform. The event showcases new technologies and offers hands-on labs to its participants. It is usually held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA in June.

Glossary of some important terms

Cowon Q5W

Hey friends,
 The Cowon Q5W has been released.
To read more : http://gadgetaholic.com/content/view/198/10004/#jc_allComments

Fujitsu to aid design of energy-efficient IT facilities

As part of a drive to optimise the energy efficiency of its customers' IT equipment and facilities , Fujitsu has launched what it calls the Green Infrastructure Solution service.


Fujitsu architects, engineers and specialists with expertise in both IT and construction, will assist customers with the planning, design, deployment, and operation of their IT facilities wit the aim of building highly energy-efficient datacentres. The scope of the service will encompass buildings and machine rooms as well as incidental facilities, such as for electric power and cooling, which all together account for more than half the power consumed by a datacentre.


The new efficient IT service aims to reduce customers' power consumption and CO2 emissions by as much as 50% of their current levels, excluding however power savings from IT products themselves, such as servers and storage systems. Moreover, Fujitsu claims that it will enable IT systems to be expanded flexibly, unconstrained by power capacity, and gradually optimised in accordance with IT budgets, reducing the burdens associated with maintenance and renovation of IT facilities.


The IT giant is confident that will be able to achieve its aims and improve IT efficiency in customers’ datacentres by using the know-how on optimising energy efficiency gained from through the design and operation of 50 datacentres across Japan.


The drivers for the Green Infrastructure Solution are datacentre’s increased power consumption and electric power costs. Furthermore, says Fujitsu, due to the growth in the integration and scale of IT systems along with their longer running hours, IT departments are now confronted with inadequate power supplies and the burdens of augmenting and maintaining additional power equipment.

Toshiba to make solid-state disk drives

Tokyo-based memory chip maker Toshiba Corp. said today that it would make flash-based solid-state drives for notebook PCs, as it seeks to create new sources of demand for flash memory chips.

The world's No. 2 maker of NAND-type flash memory said that its solid-state drives would range in capacity from 32GB to 128GB and that it will mass-produce the 1.8-in. and 2.5-in. drives in May 2008.

Zippy, quiet and boasting a faster boot time than hard disk drives, solid-state drives are used in portable devices like tablet PCs and ultramobile PCs. But their high price has prevented them from going mainstream in the PC market.

Samsung Electronics Co., the world's biggest memory chip maker, and Toshiba partner SanDisk Corp. already make solid-state drives.

Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology Inc. has also said it would enter the solid-state drive market, with mass production to start next quarter.

WYSIWYG

• The term describes a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document or image is being created. For example, a user can view on screen how a document will look when it is printed to paper or displayed in a Web browser.
• It implies the ability to modify the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.

Modern software does a fairly good job of optimizing the screen display for a particular type of output. For example, a word processor is optimized for output to a typical printer. The software often emulates the resolution of the printer in order to get as close as possible to WYSIWYG. However, that is not the main attraction of WYSIWYG, which is the ability of the user to be able to visualize what he or she is doing.

In many situations, the subtle differences between what you see and what you get are unimportant. In fact, applications may offer multiple WYSIWYG modes with different levels of "realism," including:

• A composition mode, in which the user sees something somewhat similar to the end result, but with additional information useful while composing, such as section breaks and non-printing characters, and uses a layout that is more conducive to composing than to layout.
• A layout mode, in which the user sees something very similar to the end result, but with some additional information useful in ensuring that elements are properly aligned and spaced, such as margin lines.
• A preview mode, in which the application attempts to present a representation that is as close to the final result as possible.

Applications may deliberately deviate or offer alternative composing layouts from a WYSIWYG because of overhead or the user's preference to enter commands or code directly.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology

Wireless Technologies

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology: the expert view

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology enables remote and automated gathering and sending of information between RFID tags or transponders and readers using a wireless link.

RFID is a technology that IT departments must be aware of because they will need to upgrade their infrastructure to cope with it. Three areas must be addressed: data management, network and end-user device management, and sensor management. And all three elements must be tied together and integrated with legacy systems.

One of the major advantages of radio-frequency identification is that information exchange between tags and readers is rapid, automatic and does not require direct contact or line of sight. RFID readers may be handheld units or fixed units connected to a remote computer system.

An RFID tag typically consists of an integrated circuit for handling data and an antenna for receiving and transmitting a radio frequency signal. RFID tag information can range from a unique identity number to thousands of bytes of data.

The range and performance of an RFID system depends on a number of factors. These include operating frequency, power output of the reader, size of the tag's antenna, material composition of the item carrying the tag, and whether the tag is active or passive.

Passive RFID tags depend on energy from the reader, but active RFID tags have their own battery power for operating the integrated circuit and sending a signal, giving them longer read ranges.

RFID has been in use since the 1940s, but has risen to prominence only in recent years as the technology has matured.

The enormous potential business value of RFID-enabled systems has emerged as read rates have improved, accuracy has increased, RFID tag prices have dropped, and data transmission, storage and analysis systems have reached maturity.

RFID increases the speed and accuracy with which items can be tracked and managed, making supply chain management the most obvious application for realising business value.

The ultimate vision for RFID is to improve visibility in global supply chains, but this will require interoperability between tags and readers around the word. For this reason, developing and using international standards is important.

The two main standards organisations governing RFID standards on frequencies, protocols and applications are the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and EPCglobal

Within ISO, BSI British Standards is the National Standards Body of the UK and develops standards and standardization solutions to meet the needs of business and society. They work with government, businesses and consumers to represent UK interests and facilitate the production of British, European and international standards.

One of the biggest challenges facing standards organisations is that there is no global public body that governs the frequencies used for RFID. In principle, every country can set its own rules. This highlights the importance of international collaboration in realising global supply chain visibility.

RFID is reaching a point where forward-thinking companies are aware of it. The problem is that they are still trying to see how their businesses can benefit from the technology and gain a return on investment.

RFID pioneers include Wal-Mart, Tesco and Metro in retail and consumer goods, Hong Kong and San Francisco airports for baggage handling, Marks and Spencer for clothes labelling, DHL for asset tracking and logistics and the US Department of Defense and Wal-Mart for driving supplier adoption.

The most controversial use of RFID is the inclusion of RFID tags in passports issued by many countries, including the UK, US, Australia and Malaysia. This has raised security and privacy concerns about unauthorised tracking of RFID tags.

Other current uses of RFID include product tracking, hospital patient identification, asset tracking and security, animal identification, automotive security, car licences, access systems, and public transport payment systems.

AJAX technology to complement RFID

Amid all the discussion of RFID tags, readers, and ROI, ultimately, the real world success or otherwise of RFID will be based on how useful is the data it generates. There is going to be masses of data generated. But how is it going to be represented to be most useful to the business?

According to a story in RFID Journal, the US RFID specialist OATsystems is working with another Massachusetts company, Web 2.0 specialist Inkriti to help make it easier for companies to access and make use of data.

I believe is is these sorts of developments where the real innovation will come from in developing RFID and make the data accessible and usable to companies.

Linking Web 2.0, AJAX and RFID sounds like it might turn out to be something of a Golden Triangle. Watch this space.

Novell ships Real Time 10 for mission-critical apps

Novell is shipping Suse Linux Enterprise Real Time 10, the latest version of its open source real-time OS for running high-performance, time-sensitive, mission-critical applications.

The system is aimed at financial services organisations. With Suse Linux Enterprise Real Time 10, Novell said firms can respond more rapidly to changing markets and new information, get greater application reliability and predictability, and identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks.

With Novell's real-time technology, customers can segment portions of their processors for high-priority mission-critical workloads, as well as ensure that other system processes and tasks do not interrupt them.

That means these workloads deliver predictable performance in time-critical environments, said Novell.

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