Vaclav's not-often-used blog

Recently Google opened its new Knol service for public. It is being compared to Wikipedia and seems to compete with it, although maybe not directly. Wikipedia is a great project that helps people to quickly find basic information about almost any matter. Unfortunately it is only a start. If you really want reliable information, you have to check other sources as you cannot be sure who is author of the information.

Often these sources are between references below the article in Wikipedia. However a lot of people (students) tend to stick with Wikipedia and do not look for other source, unless really necessary. It is not possible to reference a Wikipedia article as reference in your scientific work.

I believe that Google came to the same conclusion and introduces a service that tries to solve the problem. Knol is very focused on authorship, allowing authors to have control over their work including copyright and editing. Every author can also use Google AdSense to get some money for their work. It seems that Google have found a great way how to make Wikipedia in a commercial way.

What I think are the major advantages of Knol:

• author can fully control content of his/her article
  
• author has control over copyright
  
• author can get money
  
• can be hopefuly referenced in the future
  

Although listed as last, I think the possibility of referencing Knol articles may be very important. When you work on some SW project, you usually use technologies that just came to public. Before any printed publication about this technology is released, the technology gets old. So most references you find are on the Internet. Creating a standard service for such references is great.

I have tried Knol and write my first article about Java, Mac OS X and Cocoa integration there. You can read it here.