Google announced this week that they will be launching a new service soon called "Knol" (meaning a unit of knowledge). It's designed to be a source of knowledge similar to Wikipedia. Their aim is to allow experts to write authoritative articles covering their areas of expertise. Sounds a lot like Wikipedia, right? Well, with Knol, Google will allow authors to have profiles so the user can know exactly who wrote what. In addition to the accountability of the sources, Knol will also allow authors to place ads on their created pages, giving them a portion of the revenue generated from the ad clicks.

You can read more about it on Google's official blog.