Google announced this morning that Knol is opened to everyone. Knol is a Google Product similar to Wikipedia. Google describes Knol as "authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects."

The difference between Knol and Wikipedia is that the author's name is public behind the content. This solves many of the conflicts Wikipedia has experienced with credibility and accuracy. If an author is required to display his/her name, then it is their reputation on the line, and their edits, voice, and opinion are made public.

Many social networks or collaborative sites have a sort of community code or etiquette. For instance, there are "rules" to Wikipedia entries. Writing your company's entry or editing a competitor's entry is very much frowned upon. On Digg, it really doesn't pay to Digg your own articles or have all of your coworkers Digg your stuff. Votes from the same IP address are noted, and taken action upon.

I was fishing around to understand Knol's guidelines or best practices, and they do have a "content policy" that is helpful.

Knol apparently encourages voicing your opinion, and I suppose the safety net to this acceptance is the fact that the author's name and information are up front.

So what if Knol becomes stuffed with opinions and rants instead of actual facts and expertise? My guess is that it will be filled with both, but I hope Google will find a way to categorize or give authority to certain authors.

The guideline I find interesting is:
"COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY: You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service, unless you are in Cuba, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Syria, or Sudan. There are some commercial uses we don’t allow. We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website. We also don’t allow Knol pages that have the primary purpose of profiting from displaying ads from any publisher network, such as pages created with little or no unique content that exist only to display ads."

It will be interesting to see how search engine optimization consultants negotiate these rules, and what kind of results they can get by skirting them.