“Knol”, is a currently private, invitation-only knowledge sharing service (update July 2008: it’s live now at knol.google.com). Google says that a Knol is a “unit of knowledge,"* and in the style of the old-school About.com website, experts are invited to the service to write an introductory article on a subject of their expertise. Google wants to provide all the tools to write this, and host the content and so on, so that experts can focus just on the content. Then, ad revenues those pages generate can be shared.
Knol pages will be made available for indexing by search engines, Google announced, including appearing in Google search itself. Google’s Udi Manber says, “Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.” (It’s not 100% clear from that statement if Google will treat Knol pages as just another organic web source, or give them some kind of special onebox, or special organic result formatting.)
Also, Knols can be released under a Creative Commons license, if the screenshot** is right. It’s good to see Google finally starting to utilize this type of licensing (as many of their services still lack it).
One key aspect of Knol, according to Google’s Udi Manber, is that the authors of articles will be prominently displayed.
