I was wondering if anyone has had a chance to play around with the new Google Beta called Knol? http://knol.google.com

It seems to be sweeping the net like a wildfire, many are calling it the next step to Wikipedia.

I have created a few of my own knols just to see how the system works, it seems very easy to create and edit. One of my favorites happens to be one my wife wrote for The Breast Cancer 3-Day

You can read more about what Google is up to with this project from the official blog at Official Google Blog: Knol is open to everyone

Hi William:

I have not looked at Knol yet, but you're right, it looks like a fantastic tool to position yourself as the expert and drive traffic to your website. I plan on spending some significant time on it this week. Thanks for the tip.

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Great find. It reminds me of wikipedia. I like the community features and the ease of use.

( Best Practices: Writing Good Knols - a knol by Knol Help )

I'm glad to see the rel=nofollow on all outgoing links and references. And with all of the community input tools and the fact it is being run by Google it should be easier to find the really good content during searches.

Side note: I took a look at http://knol.google.com/k/deborah-roc...cancer-3-day/#
It is so much easier to navigate and understand that Wikipedia...

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Thx guys for the comments... It has been a ton of fun watching this Knol project grow.
It seems that they still have a few things to work out but that comes in time, however I really like the ideas that have gone into this project.
Especially being able to send invites to friends to help edit your document and share the knowledge.

the No-Follow tags will help with spammers just trying to game the system. It has been interesting being able to search the DB from the beginning and almost find nothing until now where there is a huge amount of data being plugged into the system.


Oh and Josh thx for the side note, my wife walks that every year... The photos are a mix of her events. She is going to continue working on that knol, as she has time, we have also written others such as Autism Awareness and we will continue to grow them as we can.

Happy Knoling

hello everyone,
This looks like a great tool to track and see how it progresses----thanks. We have been having some fun with that site called "Cuil" ---- biggest search engine

It is very funny when you do a search and the photo does not match at all, or it swaps identities back and forth.

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Very good point, it is very interesting that Google just launches the new Google Knol and then we have Cuil both very cool and very well though out... I have been working on building my Knol's it is great to see some of the creative minds come to life such as this new Knol that just hit the homepage of Google today Creating a Podcast this writer goes into great detail about the complexity of building a podcast and the skills needed to build a successful podcast.... Great Stuff, I hope to see more information about stuff like this I am interested in as well yesterday I found other knol I linked from off my knol for Aspergers Syndrome: An Autism Spectrum Disorder

So if you go to my Knol it is just like Wikipedia I reference other knol's that I found value. So I built a section that is a H2 called Related Knols you can see a basic example here: http://knol.google.com/k/william-rock/autism-awareness the fun part about building on this project is that it is always evolves it never dies.

People look at it read it and comment on it as well contribute to the document. However the Author controls what goes live and what does not.


Back to Cuil

As for Cuil that is an entire beast of it's own.... here is a crazy story I was reading on recently.

Cuil, Knol, and other crimes against branding

This is going to be interesting, I have done a few searches and it is great on it's suggestion dropdown just like the toolbar from Google... I see a ton of Google components within this project as for the interface of the results it looks a lot like what we see from Google Video if you customize your personalized search view.

Time will tell on how both of these site will perform one thing is for sure Knol is a cool source or knowledge and I am really getting addicted to it.