LazyWeb: Name Verification Should Suck Less

Has Mountain View really lost its Mojo? Is Knol just “spam”, as Doc and Danah (and many others) think?

Tough call. One thing that makes Google Knol sorta interesting is name verification for content creators.

It’s never been done right, on a large scale.

Unfortunately, Google has earned the failwhale on its implementation.

If you’re not in the United States, you’re not in luck. As one commenter or the Knol FAQ writes:

USA-centricism, again.

Always a shame to see that web-based enterprises seem to think that there is no world beyond USA. Canada? Mexico? England? New Zealand? Oceania? Huh? Who?

As I see it, this could either go the route of OpenID/Facebook proxy service verification, or banking/phone databases. The former is relatively easy to spoof, the latter has potential for terrible abuses.