There is something new from the ever-inventive Google Team: a KNOL!Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic. The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading. Know how to fix a leaky toilet, but don't want to write a blog about fixing up your house? In that case, Knol is for you.
Except for the different format, you'll get all the things you've come to expect from Blogger in Knol. Like Blogger, Knol has simple web authoring tools that make it easy to collaborate, co-author, and publish.
It has community features as well: Your readers will be able to add comments and rate your article, and, if you want, they'll be able to suggest edits that you can then either accept or reject. And, just like in Blogger, you can also choose to include ads from AdSense in your knols to perhaps make a little money.
One other important difference between Knol and Blogger is that Knol encourages you to reveal your true identity. Knols are meant to be authoritative articles, and, therefore, they have a strong focus on authors and their credentials. We feel that this focus will help ensure that authors get credit for their work, make the content more credible.
All in all, I agree with Google that Knol will be a great new way for you to share what you know, inform people about an issue that is important to you, raise your profile as an expert in your field, and maybe even make some money from ads.
You might consider it both as a stand-alone platform and as a supplement to your existing blog or web site. So many options, so little time :-))
P.S. BLOGGERS BEWARE -- A Knol is not a shallow marketing tool since the depth and quality of the AUTHORITATIVE articles published as a Knol is truly amazing. I posted up an experiemental knol myself but frankly did not like the quality since it was my very first "knol."
It'd be interesting to see how this new Google "article platform" will fare against such established article depositories as Ezine Articles of Chris Knight.
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