Google Knol Public Release Knol vs Wikipedia

Last year in December 2007 Google announced about new service called Google Knol. Google knol was in private beta which is now available for all. Knol is some what like mixture of Squidoo, Hubpages and Wikipedia. Knol is place of authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.

There is a big speculation about Knol that google want to replace Wikipedia by creating Knol encyclopedia. Knol stand for “unit of knowledge”. A big difference between Wikipedia and Knol is that Wikipedia is maintained by worldwide users where as Google’s Knol is maintained by Authors.

Google Knol has set up three levels of collaboration in Knol:

open collaboration (any Knol user can edit the article)
moderate collaboration (any Knol user can suggest changes to the article - enabled by default)
closed collaboration (only the co-authors can edit the article)

Features of Google Knol

Rich Text Editor

Edit articles

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Articles are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution

Screenshots of Google’s Knol

One of best part about Google Knol is, Author of knols can monetize and advertising on their respective knols and get a portion of the ad revenue.