Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	July 23, 2008

Google Knol is open for everyone and partners with New Yorker magazine

If you recall, we wrote an article about Google Knol back on December 14th called Is Google Knol Your New Competitor? Well the day has finally come, and today Google has released Google Knol to the public.

Today Cedric Dupont, Product Manager and Michael McNally, Software Engineer at Google posted this on the Google Blog:

A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. 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.

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

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.

We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.

Everyone knows something. See what people are writing about, then tell the world what you know: knol.google.com

Based on a Wikipedia/Squidoo hybrid, "Knol" will soon be the biggest user-generated database online. The goal of the project is to encourage people who would consider themselves an expert on a subject, to write an authoritative article about it. But beware, if your glossary terms were bumped down in search listings by Wikipedia before, look forward to a whole new pile of competing pages.