Google Knol is on!

Google has now opened their Google Knol to public. Anyone with a Google ID can now submit their own Knols (Articles).

The service was limited to a private group of individuals since the last couple of months. Google is now all set to make it a potent challenger to Wikipedia.

Article submitters would be allowed to display advertising along with their articles and the revenue generated from these ads would be shared with the user.

This alone is likely to attract a lot of users to the service especially the ones who are heavy contributors to Wikipedia where no financial gain is involved.

Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager claims that the service is designed to complement Wikipedia not challenge it.

The company said that Wikipedia authors would be able to use the expertise shared on Google Knol to improve the content on the open source encyclopedia.

Google said that Knol already has more than 2.5 million English-language articles and millions more in dozens of other languages.

It would be interesting to see how Google would tackle the issue of spammy links (through articles and comments) on this new service.

Checkout: Google Knol