Google has launched its own wiki platform and it called KNOL, taken from the unit of knowledge.

I’ve used it, and it looks very promising. It has the usual wiki feature of content creation and collaboration, but it primarily banks on the contributions of a known person. This means that editors and writers are attributed to the content that have written. While this could impede the population of content, it will definitely make people more wary of what they will do on the site.

The interface is based on the increasingly ubiquitous Google Docs rich text editor and it’s pretty spiffy. Knol also creates a page for each author and it makes it part of the Knol universe, thus giving people more recognition.

I see Knol in the same position as GMail a few years back– it’s playing catch-up against a more established brand (Yahoo! then, Wikipiedia now). Let’s see if this will sustain its momentum.

One final thought: Will Google give some edge to Knol in terms of searches in the Google Search Engine?