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Daily Debrief: Google's new user-generated site to compete with Wikipedia

On Friday's edition of the Daily Debrief, CNET reporters Kara Tsuboi and Elinor Mills discuss Knol, Google's new competitor to Wikipedia.

Kara Tsuboi Reporter
Kara Tsuboi has covered technology news for CNET and CBS Interactive for nearly seven years. From cutting edge robotics at NASA to the hottest TVs at CES to Apple events in San Francisco, Kara has reported on it all. In addition to daily news, twice every week her "Tech Minutes" are broadcast to CBS TV stations across the country.
Kara Tsuboi

I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. It's bookmarked in my toolbar and almost without fail, there's a tab opened in my browser window, waiting for my curiosity to pique. I completely acknowledge the inherent limitations of the site: inconclusive entries, biased entries, missing entries, and anonymous authors. For the kind of research I do on the site (musicians, science questions, current/historic events), those issues don't bother me as I never need to source the data or refer to it in a professional sense.

When I first read about Knol, Google's entry into the user-generated content market, I was curious to know how the company planned improving upon Wikipedia's platform. As CNET News' Elinor Mills explains in Friday's Daily Debrief, Knol will differentiate itself on a few levels. For one, contributors to the site have to identify themselves. Secondly, there will be no primary landing page or site for these entries. They will simply appear in search results for the topic, based on popularity like the rest of Google search results. I'm all for competition, but I do hope that Knol is more than a half-baked idea from Google to stake its claim in the content marketplace.