Has Google crossed a ‘content/competition’ line with it’s knol enterprise?

I always saw Google’s role as one that sat above the content of the web. I always imagined that Google was about finding content that other organisations and individuals created on the internet. Yet with their Knol undertaking they are effectively building an Adsense sponsored army to tackle wikipedia content themselves on their own network (also available on the Internet). I also wonder will all outside search engines get access to all of the information that Google has from using its tools to create the knols. Can Google say that this will not bias itself? Also should Google compete with the internet it searches, surely google should confine itself to meta data in this respect.

Also would Google have done this if Wikipedia had been using Adsense on it’s pages?

By the way I like the Knols idea, I like the idea of competition for Wikipedia, Squido etc.. I am just not sure its Google’s place to be that competitor, I am also unsure of Google’s real motives here. Has Google crossed a line here? let me know your thoughts.

* Update Umair thinks that knols will fail because Google can't build communities
(I would concur given their track record).

'Larry, Sergey, Eric - uhhhh...communities aren't tools'

He also questions the model vs wikipedia interesting.

Well Amazon have put the final piece of their cloud based jigsaw into place if you recall my take on Amazon Web services in May I indicated that the missing element was a cloud based DB store.With todays announcement (via twitter) SimpleDb enables one to build a complete cloud based web application including the back-end store and query. The query language is domain/attribute based rather than relational, but we always expected that to be the case for scalability reasons. It is now just a matter of time before frameworks (and plugins for existing frameworks) appear to make building cloud based apps as simple as say RAILS apps. In fact I would expect a RAILS based plugin to be one of the first candidates for AWS extensions. I will be looking at it from an Erlang angle and looking to build an Erlang interface (with mnesia caching) in the near future, if anyone is interested in helping on that front please let me know via Twitter/comment or email (al at this domain).

I would also like to point out that Amazon seem to be running away with cloud based computing at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any real competition for them. I am continually surprised by this, I thought by now others would have shown their cards (yes I know IBM have talked but thats all they have done). So big Kudos to Amazon for getting this spot on and continuing their relentless delivery of features to the growing community around AWS, Congrats to Jeff and the team. 

* Update SimpleDB is actually implemented in Erlang.