Knol, Google’s platform for sharing articles about specific topics, appears to have been shutdown. It’s unclear if this is a temporary or permanent situation. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.
We’ve long been speculating as to when Google will shut down Knol. The knowledge-sharing site has essentially been reduced to a “Craigslist wannabe.” The original idea behind Knol was that people could collaboratively write definitive articles about any topic they like and get rewarded by earning a share of the AdSense revenues for each page they author. Unfortunately, no one seems to be reading anything on Knol and the product never really panned out.
Eventhough this outage may be temporary, it may be time to put Knol out of its misery. Google has previously shutdown other under-performing projects such as Lively and Google Notebooks.
Update 2:49 PM PDT: Google informs us that this down time is in fact temporary, “We’re working on restoring it for users as soon as possible.”
Knol is Google’s platform for sharing articles about specific topics. Each article is referred to as a “knol.” Authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments. Readers can provide feedback, comments, related information.
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