It has been widely speculated since the announcement of the Knol project late 2007 that the Knol Project was designed to take on Wikipedia. In fact from what I've seen so far Knol seems much closer in business model to Squidoo or HubPages than Wikipedia.

Knol seems a curious combination of the individual authorship of HubPages and revenue sharing plus a few add-ons such as collaborative authoring tools, peer reviews and proper references which nods towards the academic pretensions of Wikipedia.

So here's my take on differences and similarities of HubPages and Knols

SEO Comparisions

Knol and HubPages URL's

Hubpages: http://hubpages.com/hub/ my - keywords - here

Knol: http://knol.google.com/k/my - name /my - keywords - here /some random string

In my view Hubpages is more SEO friendly there is an awful lot of dilution of my keywords on knol url with the inclusion of my name and the random string of letters at the end. Though I guess we will all be able to have a knol called Credit Cards now!

Knols appear to do-follow all links. However it is not true. Although the popular Firefox SEO add-on shows links as do-follow, they aren't at the top of the pages is this significant piece of code:

meta name = "robots" content="index,nofollow"

Content - What Content is Acceptable in a Knol or a Hub

Neither site wants the usual verboten subjects of drugs, sex, hate and violence all of which are forbidden by the Adsense Terms of Service. Spam, material you don't own is also forbidden as well as malware.

In addition Knol specifically states;

"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." Knol content policy

As the site is so new it is unclear what this will actually mean in practice. Knols can be flagged by the community so I suspect what is actually acceptable use will evolve.

Setting up your Profile or Author Page.

Hubpages has a profile, on Knol you have a default knol which is your user name and your equivalent of a profile page. However to add your author photo you have to add you picture to your google profile, which I thought was particularly non-intuitive. You can also add pictures to your personal knol page but only the picture on the google profile will show next to your knols.

Google is on record for stating that Knol is about expert authors putting their names to their writing. It support this they have a verification system which uses either your phone record or credit card to verify your name.

This has a number of issues.

• Verification only works for US addresses.

• Verification requires an exact match of name from credit card or phone account, many authors may use a variation of their name which does not match either of these

• Does not support pseudonyms which have been a standard for authority authors for hundreds of years: neither George Elliot or Louis Carroll would have got themselves verified under the Knol system

I think that most people who have published elsewhere on the web, find HubPages easy to use. Check out the links for how to layout Hubpages. Hubpages doesn't give you the option to edit HTML or to import content: Knol supports both of these. There are few formatting options which need to be added to Hubpages such as quotes and indents.

Knol is pretty easy to use too. The interface is better than WordPress in my opinion but the save button is hidden in the top left corner - not intuitive! Generally though anyone who has used WordPress/Blogger/Hubpages or similar should have no problem with the editor on Knol.

Allowing use of HTML gives the HTML-literate a wider choice of layout options. I particularly liked how the author of this Barbecue Sauces Knol created the column layout.

Features that Knol has which HubPages lacks.

• Easy referencing of sources along the lines of Wikipedia or other academic writing.

• Supports collaboration ability to have co-authors and for authors to be separate from the owner of the page. A knol can even be collaboratively created by the community along the wikipedia lines.

• Automatic version control - every time the knol is saved a new copy. Ability to have an alternative title Your summary text must be entered encouraging you to write unique content rather than just than just including the first few lines of the article, which is hubpages default.

• Automatic table of contents. Using "title" formats in your knol will give you an automatically generated list of sub-headings near the title.

• Ability to review a knol.
• Ability to rank a knol on a 5 star scale, similar to Squidoo's systems rather than just a thumb up/down on hubpages.

Features that Knol lacks which HubPages has.

• Knol's image support is poor in the visual editor: there is no captioning ability or even the ability to add alt text to images in the visual editor - I assume you can do this via html but I haven't experimented.

• There is no support for videos.

• No support for adding tags

Monetization Options

There is one option for making money on Knol but only one, Adsense. I added my existing Adsense account - which is over a year old and which Adsense has paid out to me from and got a message from Knol: your account is pending approval from Knol which may take 2 weeks! I am not sure what is to approve. The revenue share is 100% to the author though.

The Adsense placement is very poor - one small block on the extreme right hand side of the page.

There is no option to use eBay or Amazon as you can at HubPages. Although in theory you add a link direct to an affiliate sales page I suspect that this will get you banned in fairly short order

Other Missing Features of Knol

• There is no community at Knol, there is no forum.

• There is no way to specifically browse knols within a certain topic.

• You need to use the search function for this.

Once you publish a knol it took mine about an hour or so to be indexed within the knol system. This didn't get it immediately indexed in google though.

There are no statistics - this is a huge gap which hopefully will be rectified quickly - even if its just the option to link to Google Analytics.

The front page appears somewhat static with the same knols appearing on it over the last 24 hours or so. Its unclear what gets a knol to the front page - but I suspect it needs to get some ratings - feel free to rate my Italy Travel knol and any others I have got around to publishing.

Leave a comment below with your experience on knol.

Stop Press: I thought my Italy Knol published -but it is not showing under Knol's search unless I am logged in. Hopefully this is just a teething problem with the indexing not keeping up with initial demand.

Further Update:

Yes it was the knol indexing engine struglling under the deluge: my knols are now visible via knol search - though they were visible via google search first!