Knol is open to all Australians

A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. We are also introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge.

Knol provides a great way for Australians to share their knowledge, and to give people around the world an expert glimpse into Australia. Who wants to be the first to tackle an explanation of the Tribunal system for Aussie rules? Anyone an expert on the world's deadliest spider, and can explain what to do if bitten? Or how about the history of Australian Nobel Prize laureates?

You can read more about the announcement, and the process for submitting and suggesting edits for knols on our Official Google Blog. To see what others have written and to get started with your own knols, check out knol.google.com.

Posted by Justin Baird, Senior Product Specialist, Google Australia and New Zealand