Annotum

Squidoo's founder, Seth Godin, recently posted on his a blog an article titled "When Google comes calling," and in it he reminiscences about a time when some folks had all but written Squidoo off because Google (the "800 pound gorilla") decided to throw their hat into the personal publishing arena. Seth's post is apparently in response to the announcement that Knol is closing shop and moving it's resources over to Annotum.

Seth goes on to discuss how Squidoo would not only survive the apparently inevitable beat down that Google had planned, but would thrive because of one key thing- Squidoo focuses on their customers, those who care about and use Squidoo. And when you think about it Google's approach was business as usual, to focus on the business end, the dollars and cents, rather than the people that would ultimately decide the fate of each. There's no mistaking that Knol had its measure of success and certainly its followers, but not to the extent that Squidoo (and others) have had. Whether Annotum will be better than Knol remains to be seen.

As a user it's clear to see why Knol couldn't succeed at their attempted smack down of the user-submitted article segment. It's true that most people felt Knol was after the Wikipedia market; and Knol is a much more sterile, Wikipedia-like environment, not at all like the friendly "hang out" that Squidoo represents. People like to be on Squidoo because it's fun! People like to share Squidoo articles for the same reason. Sure, Knol undoubtedly has a great amount of knowledge and resources available thanks to its contributors, but wading through those resources was/is an exercise in boredom. And that's not to say that much of the material published isn't/wasn't good, it is. But in general the look and feel was more academic than coffee table. Squidoo built a creative and social platform into knowledge sharing.

Photo Courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1177635

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It looks, for all intents and purposes, like Google fully intended on cornering (or at least battling for) the self-publishing segment and failed in that regard. Google issued an announcement on their blog titled "Encouraging people to contribute knowledge" back in December 2007 that read in part:

"Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing."

"Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads."

So it can be assumed that Google did intend to achieve something more than they were able to, and that the realization that the existing Knol platform could not compete profitably with the more social and artistic sites led to their choice to support the development of Annotum along with some mutually interested partners.

Annotum however does not at all appear poised to, or intent on, competing on the same level as the more social or creative self-publishing platforms. From the Annotum site it is written that two of the objectives of Annotum are to:

- Develop a simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles
- Deliver an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles

This sounds to me as if the contents of Annotum will be more along the lines of Wikipedia than Squidoo (sounds a lot like Knol to me!). But that doesn't mean they'll review and scrutinize your articles. In fact one page of the Annotum site says so and states that it'll be up to the site owner to publish and determine who has authority to review their content. If Annotum is able to somehow pull off a scholarly level of credibility it could be argued that some people seeking information (specifically authoritative information) on a topic might choose a link to Annotum over other sources if they have the perception (real or not) that Annotum offers a more authoritative product. So it is feasible that Annotum could steal some of that traffic from more casual sites. In fact it seems almost certain that if the Annotum platform is able to capture a following of scholarly authors, and if they are able to somehow control and verify the authority of those authors and their subsequent content, then it is bound to corner the market in their niche. But those are big if's. Because if they cannot offer an assurance of author/source credibility then it seems unclear how Annotum could hope to compete.

Also interesting is the choice that was made to base Annotum (unlike Knol) on the Wordpress platform. Annotum requires users to log into Wordpress.com and create a free account, and subsequently set up a Wordpress.com hosted blog from which authors will post their content. Of course authors can self host the Wordpress blog, like many of us bloggers already do. The good news is that it's an open source platform and it can be expected that Annotum will grow quite rapidly with a robust set of features for authors.

It should be noted that Annotum is just a Wordpress theme that users install on either their self-hosted Wordpress sites or on a free site hosted by Wordpress.com. To get your Annotum theme go to the Annotum Base page here. I'll be installing it on one of my blogs soon and give it a try.

We already know that:

"Annotum will build upon the WordPress platform as a foundation, filling in the gaps by providing the following additional features:

Rich, web-based authoring and editing: 'What you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) authoring with rich toolset (equations, figures, tables, citations and references) coauthoring, comments, version tracking, and revision comparisons."