Google yesterday has made public it’s intention about ‘knol’ - a word that apparently stands for a ‘unit of knowledge’ (though not sure in which language). It let’s people author articles on any subject and let’s them add the content to internet. Once you author an article (hopefully on a subject that you are expert at), other users can review the article, rate it, comment on it or edit it. Besides this, if you let google add it’s ads next to your article, google also displays those ads on your article page and any revenue that these ads generated will be shared with you - though I’m not sure how much of it will be shared with you

Now, you might ask, how different is this from wikipedia except for the ad based revenue sharing program. The striking difference is that you will be named and displayed as the auothor of the article that you have authored - unlike wikipedia where in the author is unknown. So, if you earn good points from many reviewers people tend to start believing in what you write there - a great credit for all the work you have done

Obviously, this news has made it to each and every tech website that maintains up-to-date information in the industry. It raised a lot of buzz in just a day. Already people are talking about the impending dooms-day for wikipedia. But will that happen - is the next big question. If it were not for google, I’m sure there’d have been a less buzz for something like this. But since it’s google - which is good at keeping things simple - I’m sure people have started showing a lot of interest.

If at all it’s a threat to any website, to me, it appears to be a more threat for about.com than for wikipedia. About.com has almost a similar methodology where in they have experts writing articles on subjects on a wide range of topics. They attribute articles to an author so that one can assess the reliability of the article (though a lot of it depends on how well you know author). They also have a lot of ads displayed next to the article. On the other hand, wikipedia has enmassed a hell lot of stuff. For that matter, this link takes you to a page for ‘knol’ on wikipedia. And I’m sure a lot of people in the near future will keep adding stuff to it before google starts opening up this platform to the public. The biggest question is how will google catch up with all the information that wikipedia has enmassed over a period of time. Another question is - is knol going to be useful for users who can’t read/write in English.

To me it appears to be a decent effort but a little late - because there’s already a lot of information on wikipedia and on many blogging sites available across the world. To assimilate all of this and put it in one single place is an ambitious effort.

Let’s wait and see the future of knol - if it can unitize knowledge in to something - BTW, how are units of knowledge measured? Any take?