A few days ago, you may have heard about the whole Jimmy Wales / Wikipedia fiasco — its hard to believe that you didn’t as it hit a lot of major mainstream media outlets.  The substance of the fiasco (if such a phrase can make sense in a non-oxymoronical kind of way) to me was not so much that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia may have had an affair, but that he may have used his influence to affect a Wikipedia entry, that of Rachel Marsden, the woman he is thought to have an affair with.  Given that Wikipedia is meant to be the towering triumph of the wisdom of crowds, I think exposing this link is a somewhat worthwhile one, although the affair in and of itself … eh, not so much.

What is also kind of interesting, to me, is how Google News kind of missed the boat on this.

So, I’ve written about Google News a bunch of times before, and most recently about how it might help the digitally disaffected, ironically, in another story about a Wikipedia founder (in this case, Larry Sanger).

Well, I think this case is a perfect case of how, if Google wanted to commit the man power (and perhaps some learned PR tricks), Google News could have really worked.  What do I mean? Well, the “digitally disaffected” or new media orphan here, is Rachel Marsden.  In her retort to Jimmy Wales, she decided to post her personal reply on *Ebay* of all places.

Granted its somewhat appropros given that she planned to sell his stuff (and is going to be making a killing — a t-shirt and sweater that he left at her place are going for around $2k and $1k respectively … and there are still 5 days left of bidding) anyway, I think that her message could have gotten out just as well as a “comment” on Google News.

What do I mean by “man power” on Google’s behalf?  Only that it would have taken an active solicitation (and I mean *active*) to get her “take” on things as a Google News comment — because as I recall its a somewhat onerous task to do, and this aspect of Google News is by no means so popular that people are flocking to it in the first place to release their “statements”.

In fact, there’s no real easy way for people who are part of the news to submit their comments *on* Google News, which is also a bit disappointing (i.e. there is no clear link or clear submission page), but perhaps that’s not really all that surprising.

So is this a missed opinion for Google News? 

I think it is.  If they had recognized who Rachel Marsden was, and recognized that she wanted to release a “digital” statement, then this would have been the perfect opportunity.  Google could have, in turn, released a statement of their own, stating that Rachel Marsden was releasing her own statement in full on Google News, rather than the pithy off the cuff remark made on Ebay.  And as this would have been the only place where this existed (because I don’t know of any other place Rachel Marsden released a comment), it would have resulted in not only Bongo traffic, but more importantly, Bongo recognition that Google News is something important and unique.

But for whatever reason, Google didn’t, and perhaps its more reflective of the inertia of Google’s beta ‘handlers’ than anything else.  It may not be as great as Jesus, but I think Google News has the disruptive potential to upend a great deal of online journalism by giving principals in the story *their* say — its just too bad Google doesn’t believe it as well.

Not merely content with indexing the web in all its forms (and serving applications to help people work online, tell other people where they are in the world and what they’re doing, creating a platform for mobile devices, and … God, is anyone keeping track of this stuff?), Google is now making a run, as you may have heard, to start populating its own search results by itself.

Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch poses the question of whether its going to far, and I think its a good one.

Because think of it this way — as I’m sure many of you already have.

1. Google derives the majority of its income through serving ads.
2. Google serves a great deal of those ads in its search engine results pages, where they bracket organic search results.  Above them and to the right of them.
3. It doesn’t directly derive income from any organic SERPs unless those pages are also filled with Adsense ads.
4. Therefore, to maximize revenue, Google must logically populate its organic SERPs with pages filled with Adsense Ads.

Even if we remove our tinfoil hat for a moment (and I have a few), and suppose that Google Knols won’t intrinsically rank higher in its own SERPs, all we have to do is look to see how fantastically well Wikipedia ranks in its own SERPs to see that the *potential* is  already there.

Couple the fact that Google is danging the opportunity to derive revenue from said pages (and if you want to place a twist on it, allow people to do a kind of “reputation management” with Google’s stamp of approval, since it will be placing such a high premium on the identity of its authorship), and you have the potential to create a powerful loam for Google Knols to grow for real.

What’s the flipside to this?

I’m going out on a limb, by saying it might “Google’s total and utter destruction”, and I am only being mostly facetious here.  Let’s all think about this for a second.  What happened if most of the knols were utter rubbish *and* they were achieving high organic rankings on Google?

You would have a situation where it would get most people thinking — and it would be ordinary folk now, not just geeky tech bloggers — “why search on Google when all you get is Google results? (and some of them aren’t even very good)”

Which of course leads to a subtle change in perception about how Google does what its meant to be doing best — which is indexing the web.  Perceptions power all kinds of things, including stock prices, which many people believe is vastly over priced in Google’s case, anyway.

Long story short?

Google’s Knols sound like a way for Google to fiddle with its Golden Goose, so that it can maximize how much it can milk it for its Golden Eggs.  Its got to be very careful, however, with how sharp its trying to be with this new experiment (particularly as there are no editors and no obvious sense of quality control), lest it lop off the head of said goose.

With Mathew Ingram, Simon Pulsifer, Jeff Howe, Michael Sikorsky

• “How do you respond criticism towards crowdsourcing?”
  • JH: I think its a false controversy. There were far fewer models back then, and there was no sharecropping taking place. I think it was first compared to child slavery and I thought this was really offensive. If the user doesn’t like the mechanical turk — but you know what? People will always get something … its not nothing. Even if its consulting, popularity, or learning their craft to exploit in their day job. Its very self-motivated. My first response is that I think its a false controversy and there IS an enormous potential for controversy. I hate “crowdsourcing” — because we love the idea that its organic and grassroots. Its up to the users whether or not they will be exploited.
• “Michael (Cambrian House), this is your business model — and you’re doing something to give back to users”
  • I think Amazon’s example of the mechanical turn is what makes sharecropping such a negative thing. We’re trying to make Cambrian house a co-op, so they get 1% of all revenue as we grow. Now there’s this AGM that happens in a different way than it ever could, and we think this is a way to get rid of the idea of digital sharecropping.
• “The articles that are agreed to be the most authoratative topic on Wikipedia seem to be the most arcane. Why do they do this?”
  • The most active Wikipedians are well educated but fairly well underemployed. Take me for example. I did it after school, and I found it enjoyable. There are other reasons — moving up the unofficial ranks of the Wikipedia community and so on.
• “Jeff Why do people do this?”
  • I don’t know. But I think we vastly underestimate the potential of People. They are more creative and more intelligent than we think they ever were. They’ve become producers rather than consumers — or prosumers. A Pew study shows that over hal –
• ** whoops … laptop meltdown … **
• Jeff Howe:
  • The biggest strengths of crowdsourcing is actually in filtering as opposed to creating content — like Digg or Cambrian House.  90% of everything is crap and that’s something that I’ve picked up as well.  It applies to crowdsourcing as well, but for the most part its not very good.  If you want osmething that’s current and what’s hot, they’re good for that.
• “If time and money wasn’t a consideration, what idea would you come up with that hasn’t been thought of?
  • JH:  Its Kiva.org — its myspace meets microlending.  You can lend people to money in Ghana to change their lives for ever so that they can set up their own businesses.  Robinhoodfund is a good example too.
• On community
  • People think that software is so magical.  But you have to have a framework up before you let the crowds in to help you
• “What’s most sustainable amongst compensation mechanisms”
  • SP: The free model has been a success.  Wikia is a profit model that is a merged model for a potential to make money off of working for Wikipedia.  Then there’ll be a question of where it will be distributed
  • JH: Should Flickr have paid money to its users when it was sold? One one side they’re there and giving there time.  On the other hand …
  • MS: Cambrian House says that if we don’t share in the rewards, we would screw up our context.
• “Can you explain the rating systems on your site?”
  • MS: Our rating system  is called “glory points”. You can attach glory points to every single activity.  What we do is take a look at what you’ve done and what you don’t do so that we can help you get more glory.  We can dynamically tune how much glory points so that you can do stuff to force serendipity.
• “Is YouTube getting sold without compensating its users wrong?”
  • JH: I don’t think so.  I mean, where do you draw the line.  Pagerank is essentially a crowdsourcing algorithm.  So all the Google is built upon that.
• “Do you have any tips on getting participation on my blog?”
  • SP: The filtering is what’s important.  90% what gets submitted isn’t useful for the wikipedia.  I don’t have an answer for the question re: alienating your audience at the expense of editing.
  • MS: Its important to have standards that are obvious
  • JH: The slashdot community is elegant and moderates itself (although its complicated)
• “How viable is it to inject a project which is a request for a build that is ‘user-generated’ — is that a viable network within an existing network”
  • MS: Absolutely.  You should be able to find a segment for a community to help you create things.
• On crowdsourcing gone bad
  • JH: The crowd decides what they want to cover and they ignored photography, so there’s no accounting for taste.  I don’t know — I don’t think you can really fix it.  This model is really in its infancy.  I think the short answer is that I don’t know.
• Are there any lines which are not OK to cross?
  • JH: That’s up to the individual.  If someone wants compensation he should ask for it and it should be given.  The line you can’t cross is at the respect to the user.  Its not that IP doesn’t exist but that its under a new regime.
• Shouldn’t community be called unpaid contributors?
  • MS: People are there *for* the community, so I think that if you try and get away from that you get away for why they’re there.  Its not about command and control, but co-ordinating and cultivating.  And that’s what makes sense for me when it comes to community.