Last December, I blogged about Google’s Knol, a Wikipedia competitor platform where to read and write articles on all kinds of subject. Google Knol is now open to the public and it is accessible via http://knol.google.com.

Like Wikipedia, Knol is a service designed to let people create pages of knowledge on any topic they choose. However, Knol uses “moderated collaboration” by default, which will potentially solve issues like vandalism while allowing a broad group of people to contribute to any topic. This means anyone can contribute to a particular topic but contributions can only be seen after the author or authors of the main page allow the contributions to be added.

Having Knol as a service from today’s leading search engine could mean that search results may not only have entries from Wikipedia but with a lot of Knol entries as well. However it is still early to conclude if Wikipedia will become a big loser to knol in the future.

But what if Wikipedia offers ads and moderate their contents too? Hmmn…. that will be a  very interesting move because Wikipedia has been offering tremendous amount of information for years now and it has a lot of viewers and contributors too.

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Google is currently working on a new Internet encyclopedia which poses a potential challenge to free and non-profit Wikipedia. Content of this new google encylopedia will be coming from materials submitted by people (just like wikipedia) and for now, submissions are by invitation only. Google is calling its new product “knol” — the Mountain View-based company’s shorthand for a “unit of knowledge.”

I wouldn’t be amazed if one day google will put ads on the contents of this new internet encyclopedia.

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