Friday, February 27, 2009

Knol Authors Meeting at Chicago

2/26 Judge @ All Authors


The meeting in Chicago will be on the 4th of March 2009, at 2 pm at the Holiday Inn, 5615 N. Cumberland Road. The number is 773-693-5800 or 1 877 863 4780. Hope to see you there.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

New Home Page and Feature Knols

Knol has redesigned its home page.

Number of new feature knols are opened.

An alphabetical list of feature knols is available now.

A bulletin board is created.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Udi Manbers Initial Post on KNOL

Encouraging people to contribute knowledge

12/13/2007 06:01:00 PM
Posted by Udi Manber, VP Engineering

The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest.

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.

As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an example of a knol is below (double-click on the image to see the page in full). The main content is real, and we encourage you to read it (you may sleep better afterwards!), but most of the meta-data -- like reviews, ratings, and comments -- are not real, because, of course, this has not been in the public eye as yet. Again, this is a preliminary version.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Sunday, February 1, 2009

5,000,000 page views for a Knol Author in year. 5 million, right.

Today I am happy to see that weekly viewership of my knols has gone up to 4000. Of course Judge's weekly viewership is above 10,000. I am not really free to concentrate and write knols and my health is not also good at the moment. I shall have more focus from July 2009 and I am thinking I can plan for 1000 knols each having 5000 page views in the year. That will give 5,000,000 page views in year. 5 million, right. I think it is possible. 100,000 page views in a week.

Many other knollers will achieve similar targets and knol platform will move away from the worries of the survival of the platform in 2009-10.

I think knol admin should release knol page view and other statistics for the entire platform on daily basis or weekly basis. Some of the statistics can be:

Daily page views
Cumulative page views
Daily authors registered
Cumulative number of authors registered
Daily knols created
Cumulative number of knols created
Average page views per week for a knol badge quality knol
Average page views per week for a five star quality knol
Average page views per week for a four star quality knol
Average page views per week for a three star quality knol
Average page views per week for a two star quality knol
Average page views per week for a one star quality knol
Average page views per week for an unstarred knol
Average page views for an author
Average page views for an active author

Such a score card can give excitement, information and enables planning by knol writers.

One more of my suggestion is that blog search engine of google should search knol also along with blogs. Blogs are user generated content and knols are also user generated content on a different platform. Hence it makes sense for blog search engine to search knols also.




http://knol.google.com/k/kalle-schwarz/knol-bulletin-board-for-authors-and/1m7f8ad2dgh39/41#2(2F)1_KVSS