Google Knol The Wikipedia Alternative?

Google recently launched the public beta of Google Knol on the 23rd of July.

Knol is similar and yet different to Wikipedia in some ways. Firstly, Wikipedia users can create and edit any article they like (although there are some restrictions to seniority) but Knol is has articles created by authors who can choose whether to let other users or specific authors to edit their articles.

What makes Google Knol so interesting is that it allows you to place Google Adsense advertisements on your Knol’s, which means if you have a very popular Knol, you can earn a decent bit of income from it. As I had experimented a few days ago, Knol’s are indexed by the Google search engine, which means that your Knol has the potential to rank very high in the search engines results (just like Wikipedia) and if you have implemented your Google Adsense code into the Knol, you might earn a decent amount of cash. Who would have guess Google Knol becoming into a money making opportunity whilst building up reputation of the author at the same time.

Anyway, after learning about this I was kind of sad as I had gotten banned from Google a few years ago and as Google Knol currently does not accept other kinds of advertisement code on it, I guess I’ll just have to pass up this unique opportunity.

I’m still experimenting with Google Knol and seeing how it works and what other functions it can play, but for now it looks quite promising. And as Google Knol is still relatively young, we’ll give it sometime and who knows, maybe it might become the next big thing since Youtube