The fundamental flaw of this guide is that it betrays an assumption of the author that users of this service will only want to write reference articles.
But the guidelines include such possibilities as: original fiction, TV-film-restaurant reviews, directories, opinion essays, poems and song lyrics, ASCII art, galleries of original photos and art, etc.
Maybe this is a positive; maybe it is NOT want Google wants on its servers.
The guidelines are unclear on this either way.
UNLESS, the ambiguity is a purposeful open invitation allowing virtually no limits on human ingenuity and creativity for users to make Knol into whatever they want.
But the guidelines include such possibilities as: original fiction, TV-film-restaurant reviews, directories, opinion essays, poems and song lyrics, ASCII art, galleries of original photos and art, etc.
Maybe this is a positive; maybe it is NOT want Google wants on its servers.
The guidelines are unclear on this either way.
UNLESS, the ambiguity is a purposeful open invitation allowing virtually no limits on human ingenuity and creativity for users to make Knol into whatever they want.
Anonymous
They trust in search muscle. But is that enough?
This is obviously the big problem with this approach. I imagine that Google's answer to this is that they trust their search engine muscle to give higher ratings to 'proper' articles. This in combination with the design of the tool being optimized for article writing.
But we know that users tend to do strange things with what is designed for them. I'm sure we will se a lot of different uses of Knol. Publishing novels in Knol will certainly be allowed, but will there ever be a point to it?