G'day folks,

From TechCrunch

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/poor-google-knol-has-gone-from-a-wikipe...

We’ve known for a while that Google’s Knol http://knol.google.com/ is no Wikipedia killerhttp://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/25/why-google-knol-is-no-wikipedia/, but now the knowledge-sharing site is being reduced to a sad Craigslist wannabe. The original ideahttp://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizable-wikipedia/ behind Knol was that people could collaboratively write definitive articles about any topic they like and get rewarded by earning a share of the AdSense revenues for each page they author. Well, that model doesn’t work so well if nobody bothers to read the articles on Knol no matter how much search karma Google gives them. Quantcast estimateshttp://www.quantcast.com/knol.google.com that only 174,000 people visited the site in the past month.

So what do you do if your Knol page isn’t throwing up enough AdSense pennies to make it worth your while? You try to sell a pair of stereo speakers directly to the few lost souls who somehow end up at Knol. Will Johnson, a self-described “professional genealogist and biographer,” decided to share his Knol-edge of a pair of “Bose 2.2 direct reflecting bookshelf speakers for sale”http://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/bose-22-direct-reflecting-bookshelf/4hmquk6fx4gu/277#—his own (only $70). In fact, he started his own Knol Marketplacehttp://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/my-knol-marketplace/4hmquk6fx4gu/267# and bookstorehttp://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/wjhonsons-bookstore/4hmquk6fx4gu/268# .

More in story.

Regards

*Keith*