Its always interesting to read "all" the fine print when time permits before diving into something...

Typical...

By submitting, posting or displaying content as an Author, Co-Author, Collaborator, Commenter, Reviewer, or User on or through the Service, you grant to Google a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free right and license to (i) use, copy, distribute, transmit, modify, create derivative works based on...

Oh Knol I won't! ;)

You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service, unless you are in Cuba, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Syria, or Sudan.

That's the BIG DIFFERENCE between the Wiki and the Knol. And that is WHY many users will gravitate to the Knol. I still hear all the wings flapping. It has been non-stop since the announcement. Its like one of those "Birds" movies or something. :)

I have this vision of the Knol looking just like The Borg, I really do! The Gorg has arrived. :)

We find Knol pretty interesting. They seem to have gotten mostly high end medical content out of the gate. One feature that is tucked away is a bit like scribd, where you can upload a word doc and a few other types and have it turned into a page.

[edited by: engine at 8:05 am (utc) on July 25, 2008]
[edit reason] specifics [/edit]

Two spontaneous concerns here:

1. Why would I give away content authority to Google as opposed to strengthen my own blogs and sites with it?

2. How will plagiarism be managed?

If I were the Wiki right now, I'd be shaking in me boots!

It may be useful to sum up some of the wiki's strong points:

• the world's best internal linking structure. It is a hypertext as hypertexts were meant to be. All knols I've seen didn't have any internal links (one actually linked to wikipedia).
  
• someone already mentioned the huge number of (quality) external links.
  
• wikipedia is a community effort. It takes a community to cover a topic such as 'African birds' or 'US counties'. No single author can write all those articles by himself.
  
• it also takes a community to keep articles up to date. When a knol author gets other interests, the article may soon get outdated. A wikipedia article will be updated by someone else.
  
• wikipedia has a large amount of templates for infoboxes - very helpful when you need to create a homogenous layout.
  
• all wikipedia articles tend to have more or less the same structure. It is an encyclopedia, after all, and therefore all articles start with a definition. Very useful to readers in a hurry (and most of them are). I've already seen many knols with the structure of a magazine article - it takes serious effort to get a definition from that.
  
• images. People like pictures. Wikipedia's central image repository contains more than 1 million images.
  

I don't see 'the knol' taking over #1 from wikipedia soon.

Re:Google Knol is finally here. (Score:5, Funny)

Like I've said so often, GOOGLE IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD!

Coming soon - Google Cola!

What's the difference between Knol and any other article farm?

Direct referrals will be few, just like wiki-p.

Does Google really want altruistic folk to build a knowledge base, or is this really another outlet for Adsense, to further undermine honest publishers, and provide cheaper ads for Adwords users.

Knol = The Biggest MFA Site in the Whole World

Or am I missing something? ;)

(I was missing something and I've had to edit this!).

[edited by: Quadrille at 10:46 am (utc) on July 25, 2008]

OMG, if they are really putting Adsense on their KNOLs, then I'll have to go hunting for copyright infríngement on KNOL first. I guess I can forget about all the smaller scrapers, "services", and UGC sites.

I still do not see any Ads or PageRank on [knol.google.com...]

So we need to wait and see if its actually a MFA Site.

Early days yet.

Authors (and Google) have the facility to add Adsense, and most MFA sites have no visible page rank.

The site is, of course, indexed. As are many of the knols.

Who said MFA?

Knol provides Owners the option of allowing Google-placed advertisements to appear alongside their knols through AdSense for Content, Google's content-targeted advertising program. This means that Owners do not select keywords or categories for ads on their knols. Instead, Google's servers determine what your knol is about and display the most relevant ads to your readers.

Thanks, P1R, for quoting this.

By submitting, posting or displaying content as an Author, Co-Author, Collaborator, Commenter, Reviewer, or User on or through the Service, you grant to Google a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free right and license to (i) use, copy, distribute, transmit, modify, create derivative works based on...

Saves my time to look at it any further.

WHY oh WHY should I hand over my content to them?

Another LOW approach (Let Others Work).
Thanks, no.

Kind regards,
R.

[edited by: Romeo at 2:59 pm (utc) on July 25, 2008]

WHY oh WHY should I hand over my content to them?

Fortunately, you don't have to. But for some people, the benefits will outweigh the disadvantages. (Different smokes for different blokes!)

Today I wanted to see how Knol is doing and 'accidentally' typed it in as a domain.

... and then I got some links to the actual service from the ( completely unrelated but very kind and helpful ) dutch niche equipment website *heh*

thank you Knol!

also, there's a quick note that they won't be selling their domain.

...

Is Knol always going to be knol.google.com? Big mistake on Google's part to launch a site they don't even own the domain for!

Is Knol always going to be knol.google.com? Big mistake on Google's part to launch a site they don't even own the domain for!

It depends on how much they are willing to invest in Knol. If they offer several million dollars for knol.com, they might get it.

Knol.org is also taken - not by Google.

January 21 2008:

Strikes me that if Google are serious about the word, they'll have to buy the company. Only a third of a $bil!

© Quadrille 2008 ;)

They trademarked 'Knol' in the US back in december.

they had all the time they needed to secure EU/worldwide trademarks, get the related domains etc. that is... if they actually wanted to / cared / could.

I'm sure if they looked around more carefully before choosing brand names ( like they didn't do so with Gmail ) they'd spare themselves some of their troubles. Querying the name in Google gives away a lot of info.

As I've quoted above, the related .com domain has this message on its homepage: we're not selling our company-name ( est. 1969 ) domain. Does this little revenue-sharing-article-drop-site worth Google the trouble to get the domain for $?00.000 or perhaps through legal tricks?

yeah... I wonder.

...

I guess they'll see how popular it gets and if that's the only thing keeping them from success... (?) ...

...

I wonder what one would consider success when it comes to Google Knol?

Just wrote my first article on Knol just to test the water... Took the content of a page from one of my "sleeping" website which is ranking very well for a niche keyword.

Everything went pretty smoothly.

Default settings can be modified easily by default.

Adsense account verification was OK. It takes approximately two weeks for Adsense to be integrated (after manual approbation I guess).

The main bug I have seen is the issue with search. You write your article, save it and do a search - indexed. You log off and do the same search - not found.

Let us know how Adsense does on it when it's approved and traffic starts coming.

If it is approved one day... Still waiting and I am not the only one.

Then, I said "bug" but it is not a bug. Knol was developped this way, some articles are indexed and searchable and some others are not...

@Miamacs: there was an article yesterday in a Dutch newspaper that quotes the .com owner, mr. Knol. He says he turned down a 6-digit offer from the G because half of it would be lost on taxes. He also says he might consider a 7-digit offer.