How is Knold deciding which knols to feature?

I still haven't figured this out. As of today, they have some really nice knols featured on the top of their home page. Take a look for example at Introduction to Genealogy. This is a great knol that has useful information and is formated really nicely. It is easy to see why it would be featured on the homepage. The question is how are they desciding what makes it on to the homepage. Is it just some editor at Google picking out a few nice ones or is it by popularity?

The 'Plain old bag o' Knols at the bottom of the page stands in sharp contrast to the nice Knols that they have featured on the top of the page. It seems that they just have all of the same medical stuff that they started Knol out with last week. I have no idea what criteria they are using to pick these.

I can't wait to find out how all of this works. Ultimately it is features like these that are going to decide if this whole knol thing takes off or not.

My first two Knols

To get things started, here are my first two Knols:

Judaism
Mezuzah

Creating these was a very educational experience. I found the whole thing to be pretty simple. I have to say that there are still some quarks in the interface. Sometimes it stalls up or it logs you out in the middle of a post. Overall the whole thing was very intuitive. I was very happy to find that there were already several comments on my Judaism knol very shortly after I had published it.

Here we go...

In case you haven't heard, Google has just come out with a new service called Knol. Some are calling it a new Wikipedia. Others are comparing it to Squidoo. Here is how I see it...

Knol allows anyone to create an article on pretty much anything they like. You are supposed to use your real name. This forces you to own what you put out there. Wikipedia attempts to create an honest article by way of community self editing. Knol says, "write what you want, but remember that it will be out there on the web forever with your real name attached".

Ultimately the idea is that through reviews, comments, inbound links etc, the search engines will know which Knols carry more authority. The authoritative ones will be driven to the top while the lousy ones will end up in the abyss of page 12 search results.

I am pretty excited about this whole thing. I for one, love to share what I know with others. I think this knol thing will be very good venue to do so. I also think that the openness of the whole thing will help me become a better communicaor because I will be able to see what other people have to say about what I put out there.

I am going to use this blog to highlight Knols that I find interesting either because they are great, unique or horrible. I will probably also use it to point out new features and to comment on the general development and success/failure of the whole knol endevor.