Collaborynth

Everyone knows wikipedia, it's pretty much the poster child online collaboration/web 2.0 project. People from across the globe gather together and between them write articles on topics ranging from geo-political history to the different types of fruit fly. However it has had its problems, from accusations of white washing by interested parties, revision wars between people representing opposing views and more.

However they aren't alone anymore, Google has stepped into this arena with its own pedia offering - knol.google.com. I've had a brief look around and signed up and it looks interesting.

The first thing that strikes you is the fact that each person that contributes an article must use their real name. This is an interesting move. On the one hand it allows you as the contributor to get credit for your work, on the other hand, I don't forsee this being used to expose the deepest darkest secrets of despotic regimes.

Secondly, you are able to tie your knol.google.com account into an existing or new AdSense account. Which means that if you write an article on a topic that gets' many readers, there is actually a chance you could earn some money from it. Again a two edged sword. While it helps to encourage the writing of good, informative articles, you could also get a flood of articles on certain, popular topics (in order to maximise the AdSense revenue) while other more esoteric topics might suffer.

Lastly, Google has obviously been learning from their previous collaboration forays. The article creation process features a fully functional collaborative environment allowing people both within the knol framework and outside to work on building the article.

Overall it's an interesting approach, and I shall be making my own contributions to the knol and blogging about my experiences here.