Google's knol competes with Wikipedia
The Official Google Blog notified that the company started working on a new project which will be a free online encyclopedia. The project is called "knol", defined as a unit of knowledge. Unlike Wikipedia the key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. 
"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," says Google.
According to the Blog posting the knol project will have a lot of the characteristics of the other, previously known free social reference sites such as Wikipedia, Squidoo, and Mahalo. knol users will have the ability to create a page on any topic with information, pictures, links and more.
Still, a main difference in Google`s project stands out in the company`s effort to popularize the author of each page in order to provide greater quality of the articles. The original creator of each page will have a profile
on the page and will be given many options to moderate the page, so all editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. Google claim they will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not give any preferences to any content.
The author will also be given the option to place Google ads on the page he/she manages and receive revenue from those ads. The ownership of the content will be entirely owned by the
authors, therefore allowing for reprinting, reuse and more by the
author.
Another new feature is the five-star rating system used for each individual page which will be integrated in Knol. People will be able to
submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and other. Also references and links to additional information will be able to include.
Google will provide with search engine optimization and each page, like all Web pages, will be crawled, ranked and placed
by search engine spiders. Yet, no preferences to any content will be given on Google's search engine.
Google claim they will submit a
well-organized, nicely presented, with a distinct look and feel knol-structured service, as well as easy-to-use tools for
writing, editing, and so on, and free hosting of the
content.
"Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest," says Google.
The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely
open.
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