After more than six months of testing, Google has finally opened it’s Knol platform to public, on Wednesday. What is Knol? Knol is a basically an information site, where people can write authoritative articles about specific topics. An article about a specific topic will be called a ‘knol’. The goal of Knol is to provide the best information about all kind of topics, in one single place. They will do so by encouraging people to write informative articles or knols about the topics they are familiar with. And to maintain the good quality, Knol will also accept ratings, comments and reviews on knols, from the public.

Every knol will have an author or a group of authors and they can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit reviews and comments. As an author you can write on anything and no one else can edit your knol, unless you permit it. This makes Knol different from Wikipedia, which is at present the most popular source of collective information.

According to Google Blog:

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

Knol is a platform for sharing information. So, it offers different tools to facilitate interaction between readers and authors. As a reader you can rate, comment and review the existing knols. And as an author, you can write knols and choose to close you knol so that no one else can edit it, make it open to others to edit or keep the default “moderated collaboration” mode. The “moderated collaboration” allows any reader to make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these edits become visible to the public. It is a good point and will help authors in improving the quality of their contents.

Knols may contain text and photos, that comply with the officla content policy. In a near future, other media content are also expected to be added to the platform. To make knols more interesting, Google has recently partnered with The New Yorker magazine to allow any author to add one cartoon per knol from the magazine’s cartoon repository.

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include Google AdSense ads. If an author chooses to include ads on his/her knols, Google will offer the author with a revenue share from the profits of those ad placements. So, good authors can definitely expect to earn some money from their knols.

The idea of “authoritative article” is good and will help lots of people in finding the right information. But, the problem is that, bad people will still try to corrupt the idea by providing junk articles. So, I have some doubts about the quality of information. Well, the good thing is that you can earn money from Knol by writing some quality articles.