In Japan, Yahoo! does “Google Knol”
In English Web, No.1 Google tries to erode Wikipedia’s territory by Knol. In Japan, interestingly, the champion portal Yahoo! Japan starts wiki based annotation service “Editable Related Info Area”(Kanren Johou Eria [J]) on their news site annex Yahoo! Japan News Topics.
Here is the topic of “Beijin Olympic 2008″ screenshot. You can see more than half of the page is occupied this user-generated contents. The section is began with disclaimer text “The following are guided-contents created by media staffs and readers.”
In this Olympic topic case, many links are sorted out in categories,
- Olympic official sites
- Olympic pages on other media
- Medal-winners’ profiles and movies
- Opening Celemony
- Timetable
- Movies explaining each sports
- Illustrations
- Japan’s records in past olympics
- Athletes/organizations/media reporters’ weblogs
- Photos
- Arenas information
- Newspaper in printable PDF
- Poll results
- Some RSS feeds from affiliated media
- Social Networks for sports fans on affiliated media
Many of them are links to other contents on Yahoo! Japan, but it is not necessary Yahoo! Japan showing partiality to themselves, as Yahoo! Japan really holds a lot of contents in Japanese websphere.
As you notice, this user-generated section is oriented not for “Definition” but for making “Reference” information, if you compare with Wikipedia and Google Knol. Keywords’ definition part is not opened to outside editors.
These reference info have been there before, but they were edited only by Yahoo! Japan staff. Now, Yahoo! Japan users can apply to become the editor. There is a online exam to be the editor. They are not paid for contributions but there seem already many user editors seen on history pages.
See Also:
Yahoo! Japan press release - Added editable “related info area” on “Yahoo! News Topics” [J]
Author Information Akky Akimoto is a part-time pro-blogger for Cybozu Labs [J]. Rest of time he is writing for Asiajin and private blog [J] and making web services including comparison-chart CGM Narabe.com
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