While on my “Semi-vacation!” I was working behind the scene, when all the sudden Google launched their new (Introduced originally in 2007) encyclopedia that’s edited by users. KNOL (pronounced: nol) as in (KNOwLedge) and each page is called a KNOL which means (ironically) a unit of knowledge.
Don’t make the mistake of going to www.knol.com which belong to some kind of hardware company in a non-English language (Their Alexa.com rank jumped up from 1,112,000 to only 91,000 in less than a week (I wonder why!)).
The correct address that you may want to add to your del.icio.us is: http://knol.google.com/
Unlike Wikipedia, Knol recognize their authors and feature them as experts with their real bios and photos. (In the process while signing up, Google will call your phone as part of their verification of your authority).
I like that. Along with a couple of other options that I found out ahile playing with it the last couple of days:

• You will have options to choose how you licene your work.
• You will share some income with the ease of adding your AdSence with your work.
• I love the WYSIWYG editor (Allowing you to add HTML) unlike Wikipedia.
• And you can have more than one person publishing their work in one Knol.

I have heard this around the web for the last couple of days: It’s the Wikipedia killer, and I think that this project was Google’s attempt to compete with Wikipedia. To my surprise “Wink Wink” I find some pages on Google search results from Knol ranked higher than pages from Wikipedia, and that’s only within the first 3 days of it’s launch to the public. Which raise my (And a lot more people) point: isn’t this a conflict of interest?! Wasn’t Google’s main mission is to stay natural?!
I wonder!