Official Google Blog: A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research

Official Google Blog: A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research

Reviewed/Moderated Science Paper Publishing on Knol

Public Library of Science, a non-profit publisher of open access journals committed to making scientific and medical research literature a freely accessible public resource has started using google knol platform for publishing scientic papers.

For More details of the announcement visit

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-website-for-rapid-sharing-of.html

Some Knols Published at the moment

The early molecular epidemiology of the swine-origin A/H1N1 human influenza pandemic
http://knol.google.com/k/andrew-rambaut/the-early-molecular-epidemiology-of-the/1rl276mll9xnz/2


PLoS Currents: Influenza
A moderated collection for rapid and open sharing of useful new scientific data, analyses, and ideas.

http://knol.google.com/k/plos/plos-currents-influenza/28qm4w0q65e4w/1#

Machine Tools - Articles on Knol

Some authors are writing articles in Engineering on knol. The knol directory of intersting knols has directory pages for various branches of engineering.

The directory page for machine tools articles is

http://knol.google.com/k/narayana-rao-kvss/knol-sub-directory-travel-and-tourism/2utb2lsm2k7a/1608#

Knol Directory - Progress

150 subject sub-directories posted so far. More subject directories are available in some subdirectories. The directory is being used by many visitors to browse interesting knols.

Estimate of page views for Top 800 knols - 10 Million

Total Page Views for Top 800 knols up to 5.8.2009

Estimate: 9,895,730

For details:
Visit
http://knol.google.com/k/narayana-rao-kvss/page-views-for-top-800-knols/2utb2lsm2k7a/1523#

By end of second year of operations knol will have average page views of one million per day.

Is it ok? What is the breakeven point of knol project in page view terms? Does anybody have an opinion.

Knol Directory Update

133 subjects are covered so far. More subjects are covered in sub-directories.

Knol Directory

Knol directory project is shaping up well.
Now there is a new knols directory.
There is an author directory.

In the interesting knol directory, 128 subjects were posted till now.

Blogger or Wikipedia - Which is more popular?

There is lot of hype around wikipedia especially in the context of wikipedia versus knol that blog were given a bad name. That is only a blog has become a derogatory sentence.

Many blogs are extremely useful not because they are diaries but because they were websites easily set up using blog platforms. Blog is now promoted as easy website and not a pesonal diary.

It is interesting to note that blogger is ahead on wikipedia in terms of popularity as per Alexa ranking. But statistics about blogger platform are not available as compared to wikipedia and many people may not know the popularity of specific blog posts.

If blogger is successful why knol will not be successful? Under normal logic knol will be succesful.

But will knol cannibalize blogger? Will knol get different types of persons as authors and different types persons as visitors and improve the performance of google? Still all over the world more and more houses are getting internet connections and market size may be expanding and that may go in the favor of knol like platforms. Knol may turnout to be big learning platform maintained by a number of individual authors competing with each other for visitors. The innovative, consumber savvy, and tenacious persons only will grow to become more enduring authors.

Regarding success of knol, I do not think there needs to be a logical doubt.