Search and advertising giant Google is developing a user-generated online encyclopaedia that could rival Wikipedia.
Google has named the scheme the “knol project”, a knol being a “unit of knowledge”, according to a blog post by Google engineering vice president Udi Manber. The company aims to tie strong identities to contributing authors and those seeking to edit knols.
“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it,” wrote Manber. “The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.”
Google will host and provide tools to produce and edit knol web pages, but will not edit or advocate any of the content. However, entries that Google judges to be of higher quality will be given a higher page ranking in Google search.
Entries will be rated by the community and will be able to be reviewed after the unspecified testing period. The project is currently in beta and has been sent to a small group of testers. Once the knol tool goes live, contributors will be able to monetise their pages by including Google ads.
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Nielsen, best-known for its rankings of TV programming, said Wednesday it is developing a system that would police Web sites for copyrighted material, and notify site owners and content providers when video has been posted without authorization.
Nielsen is developing the system with Digimarc, a provider of digital watermarking technology. The service, which the companies plan to start rolling out in the second quarter of next year, would tap into technology Nielson currently uses in the services it sells to advertisers and TV networks.
The system would first be used for policing the use of TV programs, clips of which are often posted on user-generated content sites, such as YouTube, which is owned by Google. Much of that content is uploaded without authorization or compensation to the content provider, which has led to tension between Internet companies and Hollywood studios. These tensions reached a peak in March whenViacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of massive copyright infringement.
The Nielsen/Digimarc system would be offered as a way to quickly discover unauthorized content on sites. To do that, the system would leverage Nielsen’s existing watermark technology, which is used on more than 95% of TV programming distributed today. The watermarks are used by the meters installed in people’s home to identify the programs they watch. Nielsen sells data from people’s viewing habits to TV networks and advertisers.
Besides watermarking, Nielsen also tags over-the-air TV programs intercepted by 700 installations across the nation. For those programs without watermarks, Nielsen creates a digital signature based on unique patterns in the audio signal.
Nielsen’s watermarks and digital signatures are stored in a database that would be used in the copyright-protection system. When a clip is posted on a Web site, the system would search for the watermark. If one doesn’t exist, then the system would create a digital signature. In either case, the identifier would be compared to what’s in the database to find a match. Once the program is identified, the Nielsen system could notify site operators and content providers when a clip is being shown without authorization.
While the system wouldn’t automatically delete unauthorized material, Web site owners could configure their systems to take that step. “The purpose of this system is not to be a policeman on the Internet, but to provide a system where the content provider can have confidence and knowledge of where their programming is being distributed,” Dave Harkness, senior VP of strategy and business development at Nielsen, told InformationWeek. “They also can develop a business relationship with the content distributor, which in this case is the Web site.”
Nielsen is confident it can convince many TV producers to buy into the system, since the company already has relationships with most of these businesses. Convincing Web sites may be more difficult, since many already have some kind of copyright-protection system in place or are developing one. Google, for example, is developing a system for YouTube. In general, most sites take down unauthorized content as soon as the owners notify them.
Nielsen believes it can turn many sites into customers by offering a system that’s ready to plug into their infrastructure, saving them the cost of building a copyright-protection system themselves, Harkness said. Besides generating revenue from the service, Nielson could also use it to track the use of video on the Web and sell the gathered data to advertisers.
If Nielsen launches its service it will have competitors, albeit smaller businesses. Those companies that provide services for policing the use of copyrighted content online include Audible Magic, Vobile, and BayTSP.
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Bill Gates was wildly optimistic when he said in 2004 that the problem of spam would be “solved” by 2006. The volume of junk e-mail transmitted worldwide is still enormous. But a remarkable trend is underfoot, according to Brad Taylor, a staff software engineer at Google: The number of spam attempts — that is, the number of junk messages sent out by spammers — is flat, and may even be declining for the first time in years.
Google won’t disclose numbers, but the company says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that’s transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year. That could indicate that some spammers have gotten discouraged and have stopped trying to get through Google’s spam filters.
Other experts disagree with Google, pointing out that overall spam attempts continue to rise. By most estimates, tens of billions of spam messages are sent daily. Yet for most users, the amount of spam arriving in their inboxes has remained relatively flat, thanks to improved filtering.
Brad Taylor is on the front lines of the war on spam. He has served as the chief watchdog of Google’s spam filter since 2004, when Gmail first launched. His history with spam goes back much further, though: He’s been fascinated with it since 1994, when he received his first spam e-mail at a work account. Before he joined Google, he worked at an anti-spam startup.
Taylor denies he’s obsessed with junk mail, but his actions speak otherwise: For his own amusement, he Googles the gobbledygook at the bottom of spam messages to see where the text comes from. (Some are from Harry Potter books, he says. He also found one that was an English translation of a Russian science-fiction novel).
“It’s fun,” he says of catching spammers. “Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, wow, that guy’s really clever.’”
The chase may be exciting, but Taylor’s real dream is to return e-mail to the “pristine experience it used to be.”
Chenxi Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research, scoffs at the idea that spam attempts could be on the decline.
“I’m seeing that the overall trend is up,” Wang says. “We’re not seeing a drastic increase, though. And we’re also seeing an increase of targeted spam instead of blanket spam that hits everybody in a large population. Today, for instance, you see spam messages on saving (on) prescription drugs targeted to seniors.”
For its part, Yahoo, too, says the overall amount of spam transmitted is on the rise, but the percentage of spam that reaches its users’ inboxes is down. (Yahoo would not disclose specific numbers.)
Regardless of the overall spam attempts, David Daniels, vice president of Jupiter Research, predicts the number of spam messages that actually reach a typical inbox will remain roughly flat over the next three years. And for most people, that’s what really matters.
“We’re forecasting that the number of spam messages that annually reach the average inbox will hit 4,351 in 2007. For 2010, we think that number will essentially be flat at 4,403. The growth will be very, very small,” Daniels says.
There are a couple of reasons for the lack of growth in spam deliveries. For one, e-mail providers like Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s Hotmail use sophisticated filtering algorithms that are constantly updated based on spam reports from individual users. Google says it can delete all instances of a single spam message across the Gmail network in seconds.
New anti-spam technologies are also always under development, and there are already countless anti-spam services and technologies available to consumers, including disposable e-mail addresses.
It’s by no means a perfect system, though. And spammers are, if nothing else, persistent.
In a bizarre twist, Daniels thinks that instead of receiving spam offers from penny-stock pushers, mailboxes will increasingly be filled with marketing messages that we choose to receive, such as promotional e-mails from a favorite clothing store or a bank. He thinks the average number of messages from marketers that individuals receive annually will grow from 2,715 in 2007 to 3,335 in 2010.
“We expect people to spend as much time on e-mail as they have, but we think people will receive more e-mail from legitimate marketers. So there will be more competition to get consumers’ attention in the inbox, but it will be more like competition between The Gap and J.C. Penney as opposed to The Gap and a Viagra salesman.”
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