This week Google started inviting a selected group of people to try their new, free tool which goes by the name of Knol. Knol, according to the Google Blog stands for “a unit of knowledge” and the company further writes that the goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

Knol is different from Wikipedia in a number of ways, besides incorporating a major rating system, which in opposite to Wikipedia does not keep users anonymous, it also holds a way for contributers to earn cash through publishing articles. I’m not completely convinced that this is the right field of business for Google, but we’ll just have to wait and see!