ON-LINE ADS giant Google, which runs a search engine and e-mail service on the side, is offering a way to validate your name as that of a real human being in its new Knol on-line encyclopaedia. The only problem is that it doesn't work.

We were excited to try Google's Knol, a project to create an on-line encyclopaedia of sorts, with user-written articles a-la-Whackypedia including, "scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions".

We logged in using our existing Gmail user name and password, and discovered we already had a user ID with the same name and picture. But on the Knol "user profile" we noticed something which caught our eye: a big orange button suggesting: "Verify your name". The page says: "We believe that letting authors verify their name helps increase their credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of their readers."

Unlike what happened with Google's AdSense which verifies mailing addresses using the "pony express" approach - a printed piece of paper and snail mail containing a PIN code - the process to verify you're a real human being on Knol is much more 2st century": phone validation or credit card.

The process is not mandatory, but we chose to do it anyway, to see how it worked. We selected "Credit card" and were taken to another secure web page that gave us a nice... "502 Server Error" message. The error page reads "The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds". We tried in 30 seconds, in 30 minutes and three hours later. We even switched browsers and ISPs. It didn't make a difference.

Perhaps the pony express approach wasn't that bad after all .µ