Google Knol to challenge Wikipedia?
Google has announced that it will soon be launching a new service/tool for worldwide users called Google Knol (short for knowledge) which will encourage authors to contribute signed encyclopedic entries into a massive knowledge base. Basically the key concept is to create a free open-source encyclopedia (just like Wikipedia) where people can come and write about any topic.
“The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.”
Google says that Knol pages will be indexed into their search engine but will have no special ranking. That’s a little bit untrue, since they’ll be hosted by Google and will have the advantage of Google’s hefty PageRank to lift them in search results.
Wikipedia gets massive support from the community because it’s non-profit. Google can’t compete with that, so apparently they’re focusing on putting the authors’ names in lights and giving them a little cash on the side, too. That should help them pull some heavy Wikipedia contributors over to their project.
Google Knol is in testing phase, once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open. So just wait for few days and make your content ready for Knol. 
