Google has just announced Knol, their new author driven knowledge project that appears to be a direct response to services like Wikipedia and Mahalo.
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest
As you might expect, there is quite a bit of discussion going on about this one.
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Sure does look interesting, and I think it can potentially offer authors another means to build their brand, expertise, and reach more readers. In fact, I’ve just written 3 reasons you should start working on your article for Knol now so it’s ready when they open the beta.
Cheers,
Stewart
Cool. Let’s all give Google content for free!
(disclaimer: I work for not-Google)
This is less a competitor to Wikipedia – which is about collaborative authorship and more a competitor to About.com which is about authored articles – but is more geared to ‘anyone as author’ rather than paid editors. It will be interesting to see how they build out the trust networks – can I share my trusted network with others? Can I overlay a trusted author’s trust network over my own?
I’d never contribute to a service called knol! Why not Googlepedia? Arghh…
Oddible, I agree with your point of view.
Google’s prior attempt was Google Answers, where skilled researchers answered questions for a modest fee.
Many of the original Google Answers Researchers continue doing that at Uclue.com
Nice to know
But where is the URL
Can we try it out?