Daniel Tunkelang does make a good point that at the end of the day the competition is for mindshare and eyeballs, … it wouldn’t be the first time that something was replaced by something mostly unlike it.

… but at the same time there are many other services which similar to Knol which have failed to gain serious traction. Though none of them have had Google’s funding or Google’s potential ability to leverage a near monopoly position in search.

I think think now is a great time for Wikipedia to consider its unique characteristics and advantages and figure out how to maximize them and demonstrate their value. I know that I would certainly be sad if a resource that didn’t try to follow NPOV won out over Wikipedia for the basic-research spot in the public’s mind.

As an aside, I think the best comparison to Knol is one that you didn’t mention: Everything2.

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Is “Knol is the new wikipedia” the new “google is the new microsoft”? The answer is no. But it’s possible that “Knol is the new wikipedia” is the new “google is the new microsoft” is the new black is the new black.

Also — yes, some knols turn up high in the google results. But the only Knols that do this were ones that were featured on the Knol front page — which has just huge, huge pagerank, since everyone’s been linking to it.

Here’s a yahoo search that puts a knol result near the top.