Knol Falls Another Notch

Google’s Knol has never posed any real threat to Wikipedia, but now the knowledge-sharing site is slowly embarassing itself before Craigslist. The original idea behind Knol was people collaboratively writing definitive articles about any topic they like and getting rewarded by earning a share of the AdSense revenues from each page they author. But that model doesn’t work if no one actually reads the articles on Knol. Only 174,000 people visited the site in the past month.

And if your Knol page isn’t throwing up enough AdSense pennies to make it worth your while, the next step seems to be selling a pair of stereo speakers directly to the few surfers who somehow ended up at Knol.

Unfortunately, selling your junk on Knol is not necessarily prohibited by Google. Knol’s guidelines seem to allow for commercial activity as long as it doesn’t drive traffic to ano other sites. But a group of Knol’s top writers who actively police the site feel that it violates the spirit of the service. They seem to be the only one to notice Knol’s rapid decline towards becoming another Craigslist.Courtesy of techcrunch.com