Google has launched its new service Google Knol to encourage users to contribute articles on their choice of subjects.Its similar to wikipages but with a little difference.Here author’s identity is their for all to see.You can log in with your existing Google account or you can create a new one if you wish.His profile, his other contributions, his ratings etc. is available to viewers.
In wiki you can change whatever content you want to.In Google Knol this can be controlled by the author himself.He can set preferences to give full control to knol viewers or he can provide a moderated collaboration, where, he gets to choose what changes to make in an article.
Interestingly, everything in Google Knol is a knol…even your profile is a knol you write about yourself!!
We have Adsense associated with knol and you can monetize your articles.
It’s still in beta phase and that shows up in some of the obvious shortcomings.For example there is no place to show viewers what new contributions or knols have come in.Categorization and search also needs to be improved. People write articles only to find that actually no one can find them on the Google knol or in the search also.Now search is something that we need not tell about to Google!!! So I seriously expect them to improve it ASAP.
So you can expect a new term ‘Knoling‘ (like ‘blogging’) doing the rounds in days to come.
Hats off to Web 2.0!!
