Google goes knolling

I was just reading in Pandia Search Engine News that Google will be testing a new online knowledge repository called Knol.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. (…) At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page.

To us it looks like a cross between the Wikipedia and Squidoo or Helium.