Medpedia launch official but Knol has got game

In July, when Medpedia was announced, I turned on the snark.

I compared it to Knol, an effort by Google to launch a sort of Wikipedia with a business model and credit to the authors.

I asked which service people were most likely to work for? And which you were most likely to get actionable knowledge from?

At the time I thought I was being cute, maybe even silly. Now, I think I was more than a little clever. Medpedia is officially online and we can start to make comparisons.

I entered the term heart disease, a special interest, at both services. Here is what I found.

Medpedia offered 15 matches of the title to the page. Nine were prefixed with the word accredited, meaning they were articles run through Medpedia's peer review process.

An example is this piece, on naps, which originally appeared in the Harvard Heart Letter, a newsletter which costs $25 per year for online access.

It notes a Greek study in which napping was associated with a lower risk of heart disease, but warns "A randomized trial would certainly help put the issue to rest." Get it, put it to rest...

Over at Knol there were about 1,750 hits, including some simple tips (without an ad) from Michelle Spencer, who has posted 29 short pieces on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from divorce to menopause to picking a digital camera.

Just for fun I asked Knol for links to heart disease and napping. I got 29 hits, including a piece on polyphasic sleep by Adam Eivy (left), which involves taking nothing but naps throughout the day and night, a total of 2-5 hours of dozing per day.

I won't vouch for the technique, but Eivy cited well over a dozen sources.

It seems that, so far, Knol is both wider and deeper than Medpedia. So why is Medpedia getting all the publicity?