A FEW DAYS AGO, Google invited a group of people to try a new, free tool called "KNOL", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Google wants to entice knowledgeable subject matter experts to write an authoritative article about their specialty. And get paid for their work. This is a new example of agile knowledge sharing, available to view or use by invitation only. Jason Calacanis is trying out this idea with Mahalo. If either work out, authors will get pre-eminent standing over web content. Udi Manber, VP Engineering at Google, believes "knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page." And it is an SEO's wet dream, which is one reason knols will fail.
Knols aspire to be well-organized, nicely presented, substantiated items by single authors. Online Google document editing tools make it easy to writing, editing, and store the content. Once a knol is written, it should be the first item shown in a Google search for that item. In fact, after today, the top-placed result for "knol" will probably be from Google, not the company Knology.
According to the official Google blog, "Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads."
This may sound like wikipedia, but there's a big difference. Each article will be written by just one person. There will be competing articles on the same subject, with Google's PageRank returning higher priority to pages with a higher rating. I am looking forward to reading the page on "Irish Broadband" written by the Irish Knol, Damien Mulley.
Uri Manber --"Encouraging people to contribute"
Daily App -- "Google Takes on Wikipedia with Knol"
Oliver Thylmann -- "Google Does a Mahalo"
Stephen Baker --"Google and the wisdom of clouds"
