Googlified

Wow, that’s fast, I just published “Google to Revive Google Answers” and Google already announced on the official blog that the are planning to launch a service where people can “share their knowledge” (not 100% sure whether they are related) - they call it Google Knol (yes, K-N-O-L, they are apparently out of ideas to name products).

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. [...] The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only.

There are not a lot to say about this other than calling it a more social and more topic diverse version of Wikipedia, and at the discretion of the author, fill the pages with Google ads. By more social, I mean, you can ask questions, rate the articles, have friends and among other unknown features, and by more diverse, that is, in Google’s words: “the goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.” (e.g. “How to hack into your school network to change your failing grade”, “What’s Tom Cruise’s real height”, and all other trivia that belong to the deep Web)

As indicated from the screenshot (extra-large image) Google provided in their blog post, the contributed contents are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. which means people can freely use the work under the condition that “you must attribute the work.”

It will have a long way to go, I have to say. “Knol (no) knols for Google.” :)