Most of the techie blogosphere can tell you a knol is a unit of knowledge, now that Google has informed us it is so.
Knol: Google Coins A New Word 
A knol is more than a unit of knowledge. Once people begin creating these in earnest, they should become a unit of currency for Google, too.
Udi Manber posted about the knol at the official Google blog. The knol represents part of the solution to the challenge posed by Google’s ruling triumvirate to “find a way to help people share their knowledge.”
We’ll never know if some wiseass Googler suggested “posting more links to Blogger.com” as a quick and easy solution. Shame, really.
Rather than blogging, which nearly everyone does these days, don’tcha know, Google plans to roll out a new free tool called a knol. “Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it,” said Manber.
“Move over Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Mahalo, and Squidoo,” Danny Sullivan said, summarizing knol in one economical sentence.
The longer definition goes like this. Google opened up knol to a select group of invitees, to create content that will be nicely presented and well-organized. Google’s not going to edit anything, either:
We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write.
See what Google did there? “Anyone will be free to write.” It left out a couple of words at the end, which we think are “for free.”
In the aesthetically pleasing screenshot Google provides as a sample of a knol, there is a familiar AdSense block, with the caption, “The author of this Knol does not endorse these ads.” Authors can share in this revenue if they want ads displayed.
But don’t worry! Google wants to disseminate the writer’s content as widely as possible. Any other search engine, as in the ones that get the roughly 35 percent of search market share in the US that Google doesn’t absorb, can index these knols to their heart’s content.
We understand Silicon Valley operates in something of an insular fashion. Valleys are like that. But they must be pretty blinkered at the Googleplex if they think writers haven’t noticed the writers strike taking place in Hollywood.
Writers want to be paid, not with easy to use tools and nicely formatted pages. Show us the money Google. Then we can talk about units of knowledge.
