Google Knol has recently entered an already crowded space, occupied by several other websites including:
Squidoo
Squidoo was launched in October 2005 by Squidoo.com, LLC based in Irvington, New York; the site came out of beta testing in March 2006. 
Organization and terminology
Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses -- single pages that highlight one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.
Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. A lensmaster uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions.
Revenue sharing
Advertising revenue is shared with these content creators, and some of it is given to charity. Squidoo splits its revenue with its "co-op" of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the site are donating their royalties to any of 65 featured charities, ranging from NPR and the American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo.
HubPages
HubPages laucnhed in 2006 and has since been playing catch-up with Squidoo. In April 2008 they reached almost 6 million monthly visitors, only slightly less than Squidoo. The difference is that Squidoo has over 450,000 pages while HubPages manages with less than a quarter of that amount.
Organization and terminology
Individual pages are referred to as hubs, and the authors are called hubbers. Hubbers retain all intellectual property rights for the materials they upload to their hubs, and they are encouraged to write about subjects which they can contribute to with personal experience and knowledge. HubPages hosts and moderates a forum where members discuss a large array of subjects including developments at HubPages. The website also offers a system which has been compared to Yahoo Answers where members can request for other hubbers to create hubs on specific topics.
The pages are organized in the Hubpages website based on algorithmic quality index that promotes the best pages throughout the hierarchy (based on tags) of the website. Each author will earn a reputation score called a HubScore that can be referenced to meter the quality of the content by an author.
HubPages ecosystem enables Hubbers to earn revenue from industry-standard advertising vehicles such as Google AdSense, Kontera, and the eBay and Amazon Affiliates program. They are promising more tools to create and promote sites, as well as an aggressive 50/50 revenue split with publishers.
Oondi
Oondi was launched on the 12th of December 2006 after almost one month of planning and 5 months of development. The idea behind oondi is providing the world with free high-quality information, much like Wikipedia, but crediting and rewarding the author for his or her work. In order to keep this site running without requiring donations, we rely on contextual advertising. However, we are in no way affiliated with or sponsored by any third parties. Oondi is - and will remain - fully independent and objective when it comes to publishing differing opinions and views. In fact, anyone is allowed to write for oondi and he or she will receive all advertisement profits generated by his or her work.
Organization and terminology
There are several content types including articles, reviews, stories, etcetera. To generalize these into a single word, they've coined the term "oondi". The main index displays the most popular articles with the highest ratings.
Revenue sharing
Oondi is the only competitor who seems to be running on a non-profit operation. They use the general pages such as the index or overviews to sustain the costs for hosting, but all pages which can be accredited to a certain author will only show ads for that specific author. In other words, the author gets 100% of the advertising revenue.
Google Knol
Knol is a Google project which includes articles on topics ranging from "scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions," according to Google. Largely the brain child of Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber, It was announced on December 13, 2007 and was opened in beta to the public on July 23, 2008 with a few hundred articles.
Organization and terminology
Knol pages are "meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read", according to Manber. The term knol, named after a "unit of knowledge", refers to both the project and an article in the project. Several experts see Knol as Google's attempt to compete with Wikipedia.
Revenue sharing
Since Google Knol is of course a Google product, it's very likely that they will only offer Google Adsense and never any alternatives. They claim that "substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads" will be given to authors, although it's still not known exactly how much revenue Google shares with its publishers.
Conclusion
Although Google Knol only supports Adsense, it seems to be gaining popularity quickly and could very possibly beat its competitors. Most Google products manage to generate a lot of hype and that's definitely in their favor. Time will tell if Google Knol is destined for greatness or if it will end up like Google Answers.
Sources: Wikipedia
Narayana Rao K.V.S.S.
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Narayana Rao K.V.S.S.
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Knol certification by authors
Knol's main aim is to create authoritative articles about specific topics.
But the platform provides an opportunity for experimentation by authors to provide various formats. But unless the main objective is fulfilled to a large extent, Knol may not succeed in the first place to provide opportunity for other forms of expression by us (author community).
Therefore make an attempt to certify knols by any other author as an authoritative knol. If we can certify a great number of knols as authoritative articles we can make a noise about it in various forms of media. If we can't then we have to change our approach to creating knols. Start.
http://knol.google.c
This knol is an authoritative article - Self Certification the Author
Knol's main aim is to create authoritative articles about specific topics.
But the platform provides an opportunity for experimentation by authors to provide various formats. But unless the main objective is fulfilled to a large extent, Knol may not succeed in the first place to provide opportunity for other forms of expression by us (author community).
How many of your knols are original and authoritative articles on a specific topic? Self certify yourself. Make an entry of the knol that you self certify here.
http://knol.google.c
The author community has a role to play in the success of knol as a platform.
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