Late yesterday, Google made an announcement about an upcoming product called knol, a free platform for creating authoritative articles on any subject. Knol will have a variety of social features and will let readers comment, rank, review and suggest edits.

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. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

At first glance it seems that they are looking to take on sites like Wikipedia, and Squidoo, which they likely are but I wonder if there isnt an opportunity here for authors to leverage knol as an instant part of their author platform. Google says they want to use Knol to highlight the author as an authority on the subject.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

“But I already have a blog,” you say. Yes, I hope so, but knol may be another part of your author platform, and more importantly perhaps knol content will be featured on Google searches in the same way YouTube results, News results and other Google properties are featured. Google has not said this - it is pure speculation on my part, but it seems likely to me.

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

So, perhaps this is a new addition to your platform and a chance for you as an author to increase your recognition as an authority on your subject. It’s still very early, so a lot remains to be seen as to how knol will work and how it will be received by the public, but I’d say knol is a tool you must review when it’s available.

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