This is Google's answer to online biggest encyclopedia Wikipedia. Google is trying to spread its arms on virtually everything in internet. They are encouraging people to contribute knowledge by there official blog, which can be found here.

In Knol users are encouraged to write error less knowledge and any one can contribute whatever he knows.

maybe there should be some kind of 'test' to make sure that nobody randomly puts up incorrect data like people do on wikipedia. And also they should also get a 'blueprint' for most of the information from a real encyclopedia so that people won't just modify information according to their own design.
Also I hope that this 'online' encyclopedia is really good so that people can't swear, put up pornographic pictures etc.
This will never beat wikipedia though. Google might have the upper edge over any search engine but once it expands into other areas it looses, badly...

I hope Knol will be much better than Wikipedia... As I'm reading more and more of the controversy of Wikipedia, and it's upper circle of moderators, who ban users they don't like, or change the articles they find interesting, to suit their own goals... Just Google for Wikipedia Controversy, the latest is with a moderator named Durova... Also something regardin stock exchange...

Anyways, hopefully Google will be more resistant to this kind of bad influence... I used to regard Wikipedia as a primary source of information, but now, I take everything with a bit of a doubt...

Google moves ahead from organizing the worlds content to actually
providing content. They are going to launch a service like Wikipedia... Its called Google Knol

This i should say is a very big leap for GOOGLE.

but as almost all topics are covered in Wikipedia, it would b more like an replication in KNOL.
Also, this is more for money making so iam not sure how the response will be... but i believe there are millions of people who write if they get back something. So there is high chance that it will turn out to be success.

We have to wait for...

For more...read the below link.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/enc...contribute.html

Unlike Wikipedia, At Google Knol, you as an author get rights to earn revenue through advertisements.

So, basically, when you make a Quality Article, you are getting visitors by Google's Marketting and AD-revenue by Google's Network.

You get the 70% share and Google keeps the remaining 30%. And not to mention, As per the TOS of Google Ads, Google reserves the right to FREELY use its advertising networks to promote its own products (did you hear "free", yes. So, Even today, Millions of Adsense users show Google Product's ads on Google Adsense for Free).

Now this is Power :-)

But in the end, everyone benefits, so its ok :-) I am with them.