What's a knol anyway?

Google's desire to take over the world continues. Their latest attack is focused on wikipedia, which if used wisely has become, for me anyway, a very useful tool. And its free and completely free of advertising. So google quickly realized this was fertile space, a way to clutter our lives with more inane web ads and visual clutter, so off they went and created google knol. Wikipedia, while in no way perfect, is an interesting experiment and has proved that over time, the web matures and grows in an organic fashion. Gone are the days of random posting of facts and, in my view, today wikipedia has often my first click for information (after a google search). I use it daily, typically as a first step in getting a general technical overview, and a a source of links to more complete information. Google following in microsoft's footsteps (it's worked well for Microsoft, so I'm not surprised) will eventually commercialize this and we will all look back on wikipedia as an curiosity that eventually lost out to "a more profitable better solution".

The worst thing about this is the clearly there are not enough words in the English (or any other) language, so google had to invent the "knol", short for knowledge. I can just imagine those googlers sitting around my old office in bld. 43, "Hmm what should we call this thing", "We need something new and powerful, something that can become a verb, like googling", "If we call it knol, then the verb can be knoling". "Aren't we cool, lets go play Foosball and drink some more Mountain Dew".