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by: Anne Haynes

Today on FriendFeed, using my trusty iGoogle set-up, I noticed a link from Matt Cutts about Knol. So, I clicked on the link and poof I was in the new knol world. Knol can be thought of like About.com meets the Wiki. But it also has a global blogging feel to it as well. Many of the successful blogs out there are built with multiple authors and contributors and knol makes this happen very quickly. Following is my review of knol and my initial thoughts on the usability. Understand that my review could contain user errors, so if you find something incorrect please send me a message and I’ll fix this post. I’m sorry you can’t comment right now, I’m dealing with updating my WordPress and it’s not on the top of my priorities right now.

So when I arrived at knol I screwed up immediately because it wasn’t clear where I should be writing my content. It took me a few times to realize that the beginning content field was for a summary of the article and not the article.

Once I figure this out I was cruzin. The editor is sensitive to MS word documents and prefers article written in a txt editor - duh. I “published” my article and then searched on my name and the keyword “SEO” and there were no results, so there is a lag from writing the article to seeing the article in the knol search results. I few hours later I found my knol article in the search results and I feel pretty special to be right next to Danny! Please note, I’m logged into my iGoogle account so the search results vary. Continue reading and see the new results after knol was update.

I then took it one step further to verifying my name. Well this feature is tied to a phone directory database, so if you are like me and only have one number (private) this feature won’t work. The other way to verify is by credit card and ATMs won’t work, so if you’re only source for paying for things is using your ATM, this won’t work either.

Then there was the cool AdSense feature that gives me control over who’s AdSense is where and of course I want my AdSense. This could get tricky with the co-author model.

All-in-all knol is a cool product and with it’s recent launch there are some bugs

Update: Same Day -Different Time

I just received an email from and anonymous knol user that is reviewing my article. The only people I invited are in my gmail account. I’m no longer in the search results. I love “the” Google!

So I just tried to login to my knol account and I got this cool update:

So in the previous search results my article was published and now it’s gone and only Danny Boys is left:

SEO Overview by Anne haynes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at knol.google.com.

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