Google's Knol exists in response to the simple fact that Wikipedia entries often come as the first result (even when you google for Knol) raising the big bounce rate from the results page (no dubious results requiring another page of results or a new search) and driving users to a site which will not partner with Google to monetize it's pages.
This is great from a business perspective. Why not launch a restaurant when you own the most popular way to get to the food court?
There are lots of perspectives on why the Knol/Wikipedia comparison is inaccurate but what we should be more paranoid about is how Google is forcing a centralized authorship of information and opinions. danah boyd offers some thoughts that tend toward the importance of this but it's not quite tin-foil hat enough for me. Where is the Gallowaian (I am coining this right here and how Alexander) fear of protological control? This is a new new media monopoly emerging right here and we're not seeing it because Google isn't considered a media company (yet).
Obviously this emergence is directly driven by capital so we're not totally emerged in Galloway's proposed architecture of protological power. Maybe this example will qualify as soon as there's a Google API for it. Would this be the first case?
My copy of Protocol is in storage while our office is being re-built. I would like investigate this a first case of hybrid capital/protocol control architecture further.
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