Technology As Innovator

I admit that what kept me on Facebook for so long is its ability to host photos. I’m really happy how Photos and Photo upload work in Facebook.

The only thing I don’t like about it is that it auto-resizes photos to 604px width.

I don’t use MySpace, unfortunately.

The third most popular social networking site is Orkut, and I have some friends there.

I’ll just make a comparison on my most frequently used feature: Photo sharing.

The latest content-creating product from Google, Knol, is heating the debates on whether it would directly compete with current content ecologies.

Below is my view toward Knol.

Knol vs. Wikipedia?

Knol is often compared to Wikipedia.

In fact, Knol is more centralized on authorship and authority in content creation, so I believe that Knol employs the top-down model which is closer to Citizendium than to Wikipedia.

However, to repeat, Knol is not wiki. It takes advantage of collaborative-editing.

Knol vs. Blogs?

More interestingly, some bloggers express their concern that Knol would interfere with professional blogs, which also aim at sharing knowledge.

My view is that Knol does not compete with Blogs, but rather offer an alternative to content publishing.

Knol is more on scientific/academic articles and how-to style, while blogs are more for expressing opinions.

For example, this post Tag of mine is more suitable for Knol, while this entry is more for my blog.

So Knol is another channel and platform to share your knowledge with the world, with more focus on authorization.

How will you use Google Knol?

VCCorp is aggressively penetrating the “expert” content composition in Vietnam with their new products: CafeF, bnok, gocnhin and thenao

1. CafeF

A group-blog service on Finance and Stock developed basing on WordPress

2. bnok.vn

A group-blog service that hosts multiple professional and interest groups.

Currently, bnok is limited:

• Registration done manually
• Each blog is associated with only one group
• Maximum 3 blogs are associated with 1 account

bnok supports import from these platforms

1. Blogger
2. Blogware
3. DotClear
4. RSS
5. GreyMatter
6. WordPress
7. LiveJournal
8. Movable Type / Typepad

From this list, it is observable that their development team utilize plugins for WordPress. To penetrate the Vietnamese market, they should have started building a tool to import Yahoo! 360 blog now.

3. gocnhin

A techmeme clone

4. thenao

A Vietnamese wiki platform. I believe that with their financial base, VCCorp will introduce incentives for contributors in the competition with Wikipedia Vietnamese.

The name “thế nào” gives me the impression of “how stuffs work”.

Comments

VCCorp seems like the only player on this field. Will expert content have any potentials for monetization?

Apart from traditional monetization by advertising on web, selling analysis and contents to consumers is also a good idea.

What do you think about these products?