Wow, check out the Fort Page on the One Buck Wiki! The page owner JohnStanton has done an incredible job of putting great content. We are going to feature his page on the homepage for the next week.

You can take a look at his source and how he utilized the GoogleMaps function to create an interactive map for Forts.

We will also be having weekly contests from now on to promote great content as we have a new competition, which is Google’s latest project, Knol Project.

In order to improve our status as the premier wiki on the internet, we will be changing our direction of focus to better content instead of just simply advertising.

How can you help?

You can put more informative descriptions on your pages about your keyword instead of simply putting lots of advertising. The best is to put great content and ads to benefit from your pages. We will be upgrading the site’s overall functions to include commenting and other user-oriented features like the Knol Project Google is working on.

Wow, it seems like Google is building their own Wikipedia!

Check out the details from QuarterWiki:

Wow, it seems like Google is secretly working on a new Wikipedia-like user edited system called, Knols Project. I just found out about this and it does validate the fact that “WE” might be on the right track here.

We will be doing everything we can to implement features on the Knols Project onto the Quarter Wiki before their launch.

Check out the screenshot here:

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.

As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an example of a knol is below (click on the image twice to see the page in full). The main content is real, and we encourage you to read it (you may sleep better afterwards!), but most of the meta-data — like reviews, ratings, and comments — are not real, because, of course, this has not been in the public eye as yet. Again, this is a preliminary version.

[via] Google Blog