Mountain View, Calif. - Following eight months of testing, Google (NASD: GOOG) said on Wednesday that it has officially launched its rival to Wikipedia, known as Knol.

A recent Reuters article discussed the missed opportunity by the music industry to capitalize upon searches for bands & artists that result in a visit to Wikipedia. A typical search result on a band or musician will display their own website, MySpace profile, and Wikipedia entry. For the majority of the most-searched bands & artists, these results are the most visited websites, with some variations in the rankings. A quick look at the websites visited immediately following a search for the top ten most-searched bands & artists for the 4 weeks ending March 29, 2008 shows that for 8 out of 10 of them, Wikipedia is more commonly receiving traffic from the searches than MySpace (although MySpace also ranks high for many as well).

San Francisco - On the heels of receiving a $3 million donation from the Sloan Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, announced on Thursday that it has received another $500,000 donation from philanthropists Vinod and Neeru Khosla.

New York - The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, announced that it has received a $3 million donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to continue its efforts.

Reston, Va. - Some of the top Internet brands, including Google (NASD: GOOG), Facebook, Wikipedia and Craigslist, were among the biggest gainers last year in terms of their Internet audiences, according to a new report from comScore (NASD: SCOR).

Mountain View, Calif. - Google (NASD: GOOG) announced this week that it is working on a Wikipedia-style online repository of user-submitted "knols," which the company said stands for "a unit of knowledge."

This week's TIME column is up. I addressed Jimmy Wales recent comments about taking on the search industry. One of the most striking research points during my prep for the article was how dependent Wikipedia (a separate entity from Wikia) is on Google traffic for its growth. Check out this chart:

New York - Volunteers with the Wikipedia project are developing a static version of the online encyclopedia for distribution and sale on CD, intended primarily for those with limited Internet access, the Associated Press reported. The $14 Wikipedia CD will feature only about 2,000 of the 1.7 million articles available on the site, and attempts to avoid subjects likely to change over time.

Tokyo - Wikia, the for-profit arm of the Wikipedia online collaborative encyclopedia, is building a search engine based on the same idea of users working together to improve overall quality, Reuters reported.

New York - For the second straight year, Google topped a survey that asked participants to name the brand with the most global impact, bettering second-place Apple and new entrants YouTube (3rd) and Wikipedia (4th) as well as Starbucks (5th).

Chicago - Mdog.com on Tuesday launched mobile editions of popular websites including eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Citysearch and MySpace. The free Mdog.com portal is compatible will all carrier services on any Web-enabled mobile device. The new mobile sites will allow users to securely view post bids on eBay, and view online classifieds from Craigslist, among other features. Chicago-based Mdog.com also soon plans to launch its Bingo mobile search engine.

Mountain View, Calif. - Google has released its year-end Zeitgeist, which saw U.K. social networking site "Bebo" claim the title of most-searched term on Google in 2006.