Google announced back in December that the company would be creating something called “knols”, which Google describes as “units of knowledge” — which has been met with a mixed reaction. For example (and this is lifted, by me, from the Wikipedia page on knols), Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, suggested: “At the end of the day, there’s a fundamental conflict between the business Google is in and its social goals. What you’re seeing here, slowly, is Google embracing an advertising-driven model, in which money will have a greater impact on what people have ready access to.”

Google embracing an advertising-driven model? Given the whole AdSense thing, isn’t Google already advertising-driven? Not to mention the fact that the Google motto is “don’t be evil”, not “be good” (tricky footwork there, Google).

While it would be pretty cool if there was a non-profit organization that created a bunch of neat stuff like Google does, I just don’t see it happening.

Anyway, enough digression. I’ve come to think of the knol as the monetized meme — where Google (and possibly the author, to a lesser extent) can make a few bucks from delivering user-created content.

If you think about it, search engines themselves are really the ultimate monetized meme machine: you don’t have to create any content, but instead create the framework through which people access content, display some ads, and hopefully make a tidy profit.

Google tremendous success, of course, has always been spurned by the fact that they’ve been able to tie it all together — the content, the framework (a clean, easy-to-use search engine) and the ads (contextual, relatively unobtrusive text ads, where banner ads were usually the norm).

Of course Google’s launching knols to make money. Think about it — you have an article on mountain biking in New Mexico, and a bunch of contextual ads for New Mexico mountain bike shops. It’s fundamentally no different from how AdSense currently works.

And of course the key is still that users are generating the content and putting up these ads, for which Google charges a portion of the ad revenue that’s brought in.

With knols, however, users are not only creating content for Google — they’re creating targetable, niche content that is perfect for AdSense. Not to mention that users’ desire for recognition will be the ultimate driver for content creation, since you’ll get to see your name attached to that great article you wrote on how to foil bear attacks. Maybe Google won’t have to pay out AdSense earnings for knols after all.