Google Inc. is taking the wraps off an Internet encyclopedia designed to give people a chance to show off - and profit from - their expertise on any topic.

The service, dubbed “knol” in reference to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the Internet search leader’s marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be related to the topic covered in the knol.

The advertising option could encourage people to write more entries about commercial subjects than the more academic topics covered in traditional encyclopedias.

Since Google disclosed its intention to build knol, it has been widely viewed as the company’s answer to Wikipedia, which has emerged as one of the Web’s leading reference tools by drawing upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.

But Google views knol more as a supplement to Wikipedia than a competitor, said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. Google reasons that Wikipedia’s contributors will be able to use some of the expertise shared on knol to improve Wikipedia’s existing entries.

With a seven-year head start on knol, Wikipedia already has nearly 2.5 million English-language articles and millions more in dozens of other languages.

Knol is starting out with several hundred entries. The initial topics covered include an overview of constipation by a University of San Francisco associate professor of gastroenterology and backpacking advice from one of Google’s own software engineers.

With the market for electronic books still relatively sleepy, Sony Corp. is trying a new tack: untethering the latest model of its e-book reading device from its own online bookstore.

On Thursday, Sony will provide a software update to the Reader, a thin slab with a 6-inch screen, so the device can display books encoded in a format being adopted by several large publishers. That means Reader owners will be able to buy electronic books from stores other than Sony’s.

“This upgrade opens the door to a whole host of paid and free content from third-party e-book stores, Web sites and even public libraries,” said Steve Haber, senior vice president of consumer product marketing for Sony Electronics.

Internet television service provider Joost said it launched a Chinese service Wednesday with local portal TOM Online to tap the world’s largest online market.

The company has also set up a joint venture with Hong Kong-listed TOM Group, parent of TOM Online, to bring a full Joost offering to China, Joost said in a statement posted on its website.

“There’s a great market opportunity in China: content producers who are making high-quality content, advertisers eager to reach consumers online, and an active online community,” said CEO Mike Volpi.

More than 1,600 years after it was written in Greek, one of the oldest copies of the Bible will become globally accessible online for the first time this week.

From Thursday, sections of the Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the oldest complete New Testament, will be available on the Internet, said the University of Leipzig, one of the four curators of the ancient text worldwide.

High resolution images of the Gospel of Mark, several Old Testament books, and notes on the work made over centuries will appear on www.codex-sinaiticus.net as a first step towards publishing the entire manuscript online by next July.

Ulrich Johannes Schneider, director of Leipzig University Library, which holds part of the manuscript, said the publication of the Codex online would allow anyone to study a work of “fundamental” importance to Christians.

Web retailer Amazon.com Inc will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand, The New York Times said.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service, the paper said.

The service is different from most Internet video stores, such as Apple’s iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to wait as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.

Amazon could not be immediately reached for comment.

Amazon has also struck a deal with electronics giant Sony to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs, the paper said.

Amazon would pursue similar deals with other makers of TVs and Internet devices, Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital media, told the paper.

Amazon Video on Demand will be accessible to a limited number of invited Amazon.com customers on Thursday before it opens more broadly to other users later this summer.

Blind people generally use computers with the help of screen-reader software, but those products can cost more than $1,000, so they’re not exactly common on public PCs at libraries or Internet cafes. Now a free new Web-based program for the blind aims to improve the situation.

It’s called WebAnywhere, and it was developed by a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington. Unlike software that has to be installed on PCs, WebAnywhere is an Internet application that can make Web surfing accessible to the blind on most any computer.

The developer, Jeffrey Bigham, hopes it lets blind people check a flight time on a public computer at the airport, plan a bus route at the library or type up a quick e-mail at an Internet cafe.

Delver.com today unveiled an alpha version of the first true social search engine. Delver maps a user’s social connections then delivers comprehensive Web search results ranked according to their social relevance to that user.

Delver, based on the user’s search query, organizes and ranks publicly displayed content, found on social networking profiles, web sites, blogs, bookmarks, and photo and video sharing sites from the user’s online social network. A ‘breadcrumb’ is shown next to each result, showing how that result is related to the user, thus qualifying its relevance.

“Delver is designed to ‘delve’ into your online social graph to generate search results gathered from your friends, your network and your friends’ networks, to help you find information more relevant to you as an individual,” said Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver. “We prioritize results based on your network to make Web search more fun and meaningful, while enabling you to discover others in your extended network who share common interests.”

Delver also gives users the ability to tap into the content and network of people whose opinion they value by adding them as ‘Search Buddies’. Delver prioritizes results from ‘Search Buddies’ and their network as if they were the users’ friends. Furthermore, Delver provides a number of features for organizing and retaining the information found as a result of a search query. When results are yielded, user’s may choose the “keep it” option, which stores the selected links in the appropriate categories for compiling lists or easier reference later on.

Though Delver.com is in an early stage of product development, it demonstrates the great potential and necessity of social search. Delver currently covers Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Hi5, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious; other sources, such as Facebook and the top blogging platforms will be added to the service over the next few months.

Time Warner Inc’s AOL will launch a personal finance site on Tuesday, adding to a roster of new properties that do not bear its name.

The new site, called WalletPop.com, is a spin-off of AOL’s Money & Finance channel and will focus on consumer and personal finance. AOL Money & Finance will continue to business and investing news and tools.

The launch of another site not bearing the AOL brand is part of a plan to create new online businesses courting younger audiences unfamiliar with a company whose heyday ended with the popularity of high speed Internet access.

Sony says it will start a movie download service for its PlayStation 3 home console this summer in the U.S.

Kazuo Hirai, who heads Sony Corp.’s video game unit, said Thursday the service will be offered in Japan and Europe at later dates, although details won’t be available until next month.

Hirai said the company will strengthen its network services and further cut costs to achieve profitability in the Sony gaming business in the current fiscal year ending March 2009.

Ever wonder whether you’d be better off working some place else?

A new Web site called Glassdoor.com is trying to make it easier to find out by compiling free snapshots of the current salaries paid by hundreds of major employers, along with reviews anonymously written by current and past workers.

“We think it’s super important that people are able to find a job where they can go home happy at the end of the day,” said Robert Hohman, Glassdoor’s co-founder and chief executive.

The Sausalito-based startup’s other founders include Rich Barton, CEO of online home appraisal site Zillow.com.

By providing free access to sensitive salary information and sometimes blunt reviews of companies, Glassdoor is bound to upset some employers, predicted Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr.

The Washington Post Co said on Wednesday that it is launching a new unit that will develop and manage a family of Web-based magazines.

The Slate Group plans to get into other new media ventures that it develops on its own or through acquisitions, the company said in a statement.

“The rationale is that you can build an audience beyond Slate’s existing audience in certain vertical or demographic categories,” the group’s editor-in-chief, Jacob Weisberg, said in an interview on Wednesday.

“I think it’s sort of the logic by which Time magazine gave birth to Sports Illustrated and People, and it’s the idea that you can incubate a magazine within another magazine,” said Weisberg, who was editor of Slate magazine before being named editor-in-chief of the Slate Group.

Amazon.com Inc, the largest Internet retailer, will launch a streaming video service in the next few weeks to augment its digital offerings, the company’s chief executive said on Wednesday.

Jeff Bezos, speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s three-day D: All Things Digital conference taking place north of San Diego, did not elaborate, and a company spokeswoman would not provide more information.

The Seattle-based company has been beefing up its digital media offerings in order to better compete with rivals such as Apple Inc, which dominates the category with the popular iTunes music download service.