Google Knol Unleashed- Wikipedias New Competition

Google publicly launched Knol--(their term for a unit of knowledge) on Wednesday. It's Google's answer to Wikipedia and allows authors to publish content and articles about their area of expertise or interest.

Unlike Wikipedia though, you can set your knols to prevent users from adding, revising, and making changes to your knols. After creating a few knols today, it seems to be more like a Squidoo or Hubpages than Wikipedia.

It will be interesting to see if Google gives any extra weight in the search engine listings to their Knol pages over Wikipedia pages. Of course, Google says that they won't, but with Google placing their ads on Knol pages it seems it might be in their interest to display their pages above their competition.

This is going to be a huge opportunity for online marketers to create knols in their area of expertise that can help brand them as experts, introduce their services, and drive traffic to their websites.

One caution of warning! If you are a marketer that is looking at Google's Knol as an opportunity to drive traffic to your site, then use best practices and do not be spammy.