by jay » Thu Jul 24, 2008 11:49 am
In a move widely seen as the Silicon Valley behemoth's answer to Wikipedia, this week Google opened Knol, its own user-generated encyclopedia, to the public.
In a move widely seen as the Silicon Valley behemoth's answer to Wikipedia, this week Google opened Knol, its own user-generated encyclopedia, to the public.
Ad-supported Google Knol identifies authors and allows them to make money from ads that appear on the page.
Unlike Wikipedia, people who write entries on Google's encyclopedia are identified and could even earn a profit from their articles with ads. The more times the article is viewed, the more an author can get paid. Google, of course, gets a cut of the profits.
"The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content," the company wrote on its blog Wednesday. "It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good."
Knol has been operating on a trial basis with a company-selected, invite-only group of authors since December 2007.
"Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," the company wrote on its blog in December. "We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of Web content."
Jay M
Write Less, Do More