Meme Moy: January 2008 Archives

In early December Google soft-announced that they are currently working on new free tool they are calling "knol" which stands for "unit of knowledge". Udi Manber, VP Engineering at Google had this to say about the tool in his post entitled "Encouraging People to Contribute Knowledge"

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest.

Here is a sample of a Knol entry that talks about Insomnia.  

PC World tried to dissect some of the details on the Knol project in Google takes a Crack at Wikipedia 

Google is gunning for Wikipedia with a new service called Knol that aims to capitalize on the growing popularity of social encyclopedias. The Google Knol (defined as a "unit of knowledge") project is in closed trials right now with no word on when it will be open to the public to try.

According to a recent blog posting about the Knol project by Google we know a bit about what to expect. From what I can tell Knol shares a lot of the same traits as the pre-existing types of social reference pages such as Wikipedia, Squidoo, and Mahalo. As with these other services Knol users have the ability to create a page on any topic with information, pictures, links and more. It's in the details where Google is looking to one-up the competition and justify its existence

Google's primary focus on Knol will be with the authorship of each page. The original creator of each page will have a miniature profile on the page and will be given a wide variety of options to control the page.

One significant difference between Knol and competing services is that authors will be given the option to place Google ads on the pages they manage and receive revenue from those ads.

As people are slowly learning more about this tool - more and more are giving their opinions on how this affects the Wikipedia dynamic. Betsy Schiffman of Wired magazine's "Google's Units of Knowledge May Raise Conflict of Interest",  says:

 
The Knol project will also do little to ease critics' concerns that Google already plays too dominant a role in how people access information online. Google owns the search market (with a 69 percent market share in November), and with the flip of a switch (or a slight alteration to its search algorithm), it can direct people to, or away from, any given site. Google says it will rank knols "appropriately" so that their relative worth will be reflected in search results. To some extent, though, it raises the question of whether Google can rank competitors objectively given that the search company may have a financial incentive to keep Google-owned content at the top of its search results.

"At the end of the day, there's a fundamental conflict between the business Google is in and its social goals," says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "What you're seeing here, slowly, is Google embracing an advertising-driven model, in which money will have a greater impact on what people have ready access to."

Jason Goldman who used to work at Goldman and now works for Twitter has this say about the Knol from his post Argumentum ad Verecundiam -

On the first point, a big reason this is happening is because of the amount of unmonetizable traffic Google sends to Wikipedia. Guess what the "I'm feeling Lucky" hit is for the title of this post. And Wikipedia won't accept advertising. Let's build Knol.

The further justification for Knol is "Who can trust all that crap on Wikipeda?" Google is fundamentally an academic institution and part of that ethos is that things aren't really "good" unless peer reviewed. The concept of peer review is central to how work is done inside Google and that basically works as far as it goes. Unfortunately, that ethos has extended to the way Google views content on the web. Sergey once asked the Blogger team how Blogger was going to compete with the New York Times. Even though our pageviews exceeded those of the NYT, the point I think he was making was "When are you gonna produce something authoritative that lots of people will accept as good." Blogger's answer was "Huh?" Knol's answer is peer review.

So far access to Knol is by invitation only and it looks like things are still in the works at Google, till we know more, it still remains to be seen what the future really holds for Google's Knol tool.

Matt Cutts made a couple of thought-provoking comments in his blog regarding subdomains and subdirectories, knowledge which may come in handy as you plan your Web site taxonomy and content.

For several years Google has used something called "host crowding," which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen.
This change doesn't apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain. For example, with a search query like [ibm] the user probably likes/wants to see several results from ibm.com. Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn't affect a majority of our queries...
My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you're a newer webmaster or SEO, I'd recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you'll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.

Search Engine Watch presents their take on subdomains and subdirectories in SEO Strategies: Subdomains and Subdirectories

Subdomains should only be used when you have enough vertical content to support a standalone Web site. Subdomains are effective because they "piggy back" on the value of the root domain, whereas if you bought a new domain, it would have no authority/age. Plus, there are some unique things you can do from a SEO perspective.

One thing to keep in mind is that your subdomain's content should be unique, says SearchNewz "Advice On Subdomains Vs. Subdirectories For SEO" 

I've seen a lot of sites which had varying degrees of quality in their subdomaining strategies. If you do have subdomains, you should ideally insure that they contain primarily unique content not reflected on your other domains " each subdomain should contain page content that does not also live on other subdomains or else it can appear that you are attempting to spam the search engine indices.
If you are considering how to structure your URLs and site content for natural search marketing, I'd say you might be better off just using a simple format of descriptively keyworded directories and subdirectories rather than keyworded subdomains. This is often easier to manage, and it looks a lot more natural/reasonable from the search engines perspective. Theres lower likelihood of accidentally mirroring/duplicating your content, too.

When all is said and done and you've poured what you could into your site(s), take a step back and come at it from the perspective of your target market. Redundancy or sub-par content can not only ruin your search optimization efforts, but also your reputation as an "expert" in your business/field.

The world is shrinking. The time when only rich huge corporations were able to globalize is definitely in the past. In many ways, the market for your business may only be limited by your own imagination. As the digital divide gets narrower and narrower, and with efficiencies in shipping and services vastly improving, you might not be able to afford not globalizing your business.

In Fortune's Take Your Business Global Alessandra Bianchi has this to say about the growing globalization of small businesses -

Has your small business gone global yet? In an increasingly wired world, adding an international dimension - whether through importing, exporting, outsourcing, manufacturing overseas, or forming a strategic partnership - is now the province of both mom and pop ventures and large conglomerates. It is becoming almost as easy to do business in Peru as it is in Peoria. Result: The number of startups venturing overseas is skyrocketing. One recent study found that the number of multinational companies has swelled from 7,000 in 1975 to approximately 40,000 today. In addition, the net income of U.S. companies from operations outside the States now accounts for about half of income earned at home, compared to just 10 percent in 1950.

In Inc.com's article Gone Global - Why expanding overseas is your ticket to new markets, new ideas, and a world of adventure  Leigh Buchanan says -

Foreign markets are like children's shoes: They offer plenty of room to grow. According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, 95 percent of the world's consumers reside outside the United States. Some of those people have holes in their lives the exact size and shape of your product.
Entrepreneurs are getting the message. In a survey of 449 CEOs conducted by Inc. and Amar Bhidé, a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, 58 percent of those doing business overseas reported that foreign demand for their product was growing. Furthermore, just 12 percent of the stay-at-homes blamed their hesitation on a lack of demand. Anecdotally, a surprisingly large number of CEOs interviewed for this package--selling everything from trash-compacting equipment to toothbrushes to public relations--have been making money overseas for a decade or more. Perhaps the question facing businesses pondering globalization should not be "Why?" but rather "Why not?"
 

So where do you start? Cnn's money.com uncovers this in  Who in the world is entrepreneurial? Where they scan the globe to uncover which countries are the most - and least - friendly to small business. 

Research is the best place to start learning more - money.com has "Best sites for global entrepreneurs" - a guide to researching the international marketplace.

Need more inspiration? Marketing profs talks about "Going Global in a Web 2.0 World: A Punch List for Small Business  where they run through how a "local" designer globalized her small business using online sites and tools". 

Globalization may not be for everybody, but if it is for your business, this is as good a time as it gets to start taking the first steps beyond your backyard and into the wider world outside.