As some of you may have become aware, Google has announced that later in 2008 they will be going forward with the project known as "Knol". Knol will be a sort of hybrid between about.com and wikipedia.com. Like wikipedia, there will be entries for nearly every topic, place, person, there is that means anything in the world. Unlike wikipedia, knol will be solely published by one individual and then that individual will be allowed to accept new entries for that given topic, edit and change the topic, and be credited for writing the entry.
Knol will have a unique voting system that will allow Google, to in a way, rank how informative the entry is. Unlike wikipedia, where just any person online can come and ruin an entry by putting fake information into it. This has become a major issue with wikipedia over the years as so called "internet terrorists" have somewhat ruined what could have been an amazing web information portal.
Why will Knol eventually overtake Wikipedia in terms of internet traffic?
As you probably know, Google accounts for nearly 60% of all worldwide internet searches. What you may not know is that Google is responsible for approximately 30% of all of wikipedia's traffic. Now if Google starts listing their own knol entries in the search results, in place of, or above wikipedia, we will see a major shift in traffic from wikipedia to Googles knol.
Google, unlike wikipedia will actually reward those authors of an entry by allowing them to share in the ad dollars brought in by all of their knol entries. This will provide incentive for experts in each field of work to share their knowledge with the internet community, and more then likely tear them away from wikipedia. Why would they spend hours sharing information on wikipedia when they can spend the time creating knol entries, and earning residual revenue for their work? The answer is, simply they won't.
Google has tremendous power behind it, not only in terms of marketing, but also in that they are able to improve upon already existing ideas with amazing speed and efficiency. Knol should begin their beta by March of 2008.
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