One of Google's latest projects is Knol, a place where the company envisions experts will share their knowledge on a variety of topics. The New York Times reports that Google hopes to create a sort of online encyclopedia built from the contributions of scores of individuals—which may sound familiar:

"[While] Wikipedia is collectively edited and ad-free, Knol contributors sign their articles and retain editing control over the content. They can choose to place ads, sold by Google, on their pages."

The report said that this latest effort, while interesting, has already rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. It not only has its ubiquitous search engine, but it also owns DoubleClick, owns the content platform YouTube, and Blogger, a top publishing service.

Then again, it's not like we haven't heard this before. To date, Google's actual content *creation* initiatives have been few and far between. Knol is one of the closest ones we can think of, but even there, the company isn't creating content.