Are You An Expert? Check Out Google Knol
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Posted by Jenn Lowther
* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity
On Wednesday, Google announced the launch of their new product – Google Knol. A Knol is an article about specific topics written by experts on that subject.
According to Google’s press release, “Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.”
Users can submit comments, rate, and review the various knols. Also, authors can choose to make their knol closed, so that no one else can edit it or they can make it completely open to others to edit- the prinicple behind a wiki.
Google is setting Knol up to compete against Wikipedia.The main competitive difference between Google Knol and Wikipedia is that every knol will have an author or group of authors, whose name is prominent in the knol. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. This is just the latest in a series of releases that Google has undertaken to compete against online industries that they currently didn’t have a product to compete in the marketplace.
