You might not have heard of Google Knol, the service Google launched in an attempt to eclipse Wikipedia as a world-accessible font of knowledge. In a post last year I included it in a list of reasons why Google might be thought to have jumped the shark, and asked in vain if anyone reading this blog actually used it.

The resulting silence probably said more about my obscurity than Google Knol’s, but it turns out that Google Knol is indeed floundering. As TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfield wrote yesterday:

[Knol’s] model doesn’t work so well if nobody bothers to read the articles… Quantcast estimates that only 174,000 people visited the site in the past month.

And Knol is seeking to counter this evident public apathy by repositioning itself as a competitor to Craigslist. But Schonfield doesn’t see this working out:

Google should just end its misery, just like it did when it killed other under-performing projects such as Lively and Google Notebooks. Knol will never come close to Wikipedia. It can’t even cut it as a classifieds listing site.

Ouch!