Clinamen

Slashdot reports that Google is developing a tool called "Knoll" that will provide some of the same functionality as Wikipedia - with some important differences. From the Google Blog:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

This sounds like an interesting answer to Larry Sanger's Citizendium project. The fact that it's Google-backed is not good news for Sanger.

More projects like this are bound to pop up as we continue to search for "authoritative" information. I think this is a good step. I also don't think it will replace Wikipedia, which has a massive footprint that would be difficult to unseat.