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In an effort to organize human knowledge, Google unveiled its plans to build a new Web destination for those who wish to share their knowledge.

The service, called Knol, which is short for knowledge, would allow people to create Web pages on any topic.

It is designed to include features that permit readers to submit comments, rate pages and suggest changes. However, unlike Wikipedia, which allows anyone to edit an entry, only the author of a “knol,” as the pages in the service would be called, would be allowed to edit. Different authors could have competing pages on the same topic.

Udi Manber, VP Engineer at Google, says “there are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. But, Google considers that despite the fact we are living in a world where a blog is created at every 8 seconds, sharing the knowledge is not simply enough.”

Google's primary focus on Knol will be with the authorship of each page. The original creator of each page will have a miniature profile on the page and will be given a wide variety of options to control the page. The author of a page can also limit what other users can and can't modify on their page.

A comments section will always exist, allowing users to weigh in on the page, but actual modification of the bulk of the content can be completely restricted by the author and owner of the page, said Google.

One significant difference between Knol and competing services is that authors will be given the option to place Google ads on the pages they manage and receive revenue from those ads.

According to Google, One of the major problems with Wikipedia is the credibility. Because Wikipedia pages can be edited by anyone credibility issues crop up a lot. With Knol, author profiles are directly placed on the page giving browsers a sense of who is behind the information. Authors also have the ability to disallow other users from modifying the entries.

Having users submit pages to the new service could potentially give Google an abundant new landscape to populate with advertising, and because the knol pages will be focused on specific topics, they may be able to attract relatively high-value advertising, said Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling. "If it takes off, you can certainly see applications for local content and advertising," said Sterling.

At this point, Knol or whatever its final name will be seems more like a Wikipedia alternative. It seems somewhat closer to a matrix of blogs or a kind of Digg.com with articles instead of links, than to an online encyclopedia.

It will certainly be interesting to follow and see what the final concept of the project will turn out to be. Only then, one can actually see Knol work and evaluate its functionality and usefulness.