Google(GOOG) has just announced public opening of their new wiki-knowledge product called “Knol”.
After months of deliberation since December of last year, this project is finally open for people to use.
Let’s take a quick look:
For responding to a Knol subject such as this Lung Cancer article, the user can leave a review with a rating. This supposedly validates the experts’ writing and becomes part of Knol’s rating system.
Knol also let’s you leave comments. I believe the comments section is really for those quick comments but the review section should be used for expert reviewers of that subject.
Let’s take a look at the writing aspects of Knol. You can write a new Knol yourself but you need to stay within these guidelines:
The Knol project is a site that hosts many knols — units of knowledge — written about various subjects. The authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments. Users can provide feedback, comments, related information. So the Knol project is a platform for sharing information, with multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information.
Knols are indexed by the big search engines, of course. And well-written knols become popular the same as regular web pages. The Knol site allows anyone to write and manage knols through a browser on any computer.
Writing a good Knol can definitely boost your SEO and online visibility, especially you are good at what you write about.
Here’s a screenshot of writing a new Knol. It looks pretty simple and basically it’s like Wikipedia but easier to use.
I don’t know how popular this Knol Project will become but I am sure many webmasters will take advantage of the early SEO you can gain from writing expertise articles.
Wow, Wordpress 2.6 is out with some really cool new features.
First of all, the new Wordpress 2.6 adds ability to edit multiple revisions, sorta like Wiki editing.
Second, the new Wordpress allows you to cut and paste text and images easily using a bookmarklet.
Check out the video for the features:
Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.
Foundcity, a site that attempts to list favorite things to do at a metropolitan city, does a very horrible job of implementing GoogleMaps API. At best, it’s going to be a horribly designed site that no one will use.
They will really need to hire real engineers to make the site right.
Foundcity is a social mapping tool for creating a personalized map of your life on-the-fly. From your computer or cell phone, you tag locations, add photos, label them with any words you want, and plot them to your map, which you can share with friends, keep private, or publish openly.
Here’s a interesting Adobe AIR application made in about 5 minutes.
It literally took me 11 lines of code and a good 15 minutes to build. Decided to send it to Leo and was happy to hear how excited he was about the app and did a plug for it on the net@night and MacBreak Weekly podcasts.
You can use the application to watch the live video stream and see the schedule for upcoming shows. Looks like it was released just in time to see him do the 24 hour iPhone 3G launch marathon.
Basically, you can enter a domain name and find out if that website is up or not.
It’s a pretty simple idea that might do good for people wondering that question all the time.
“I had seen that question posed so often,” said Mr. Payne, who perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a Web messaging and social networking site that is itself known for frequent downtime. “Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is always on and where information is always available. People are disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be true.”
Did U Mean? - The Misspelling Blog has launched their new blog, Did-u-Mean.com. It’s a blog about common and uncommon misspellings of the English words.
Here’s comes Twellow, a search engine for twitters basically. I typed, “zedomax” and found my twitter account which is cool I guess.
Beyond that, there are other functions like you can search by categories and whatnot.
I think this is a really good idea as search engines have proven to make a lot of money. (Google???)
Twellow is a great new search tool and directory for discovering Twitter users that could fundamentally change the way people use the microblogging service.
Launched by the same people behind the tech news site WebProNews, Twellow has indexed more than 300,000 users and sorted them into categories like programming, marketing, graphic design, and dozens of others to help you find users who list those characteristics in their Twitter biographies. There are also sub-categories, so within “Programming” you can browse users who list PHP, Ruby on Rails, or another programming ski
GoogleTrends announces that they can now track website analytics. From what I can tell and testing some of my sites, it’s not accurate at all (at least not yet) and I believe that’s because they are only using opt-in data. None of my websites use any opt-in stats so we will still have to rely on other sources such as Alexa for now.
The service in turn competes with established public traffic tracking services like Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast, all of which have often been criticized for being fairly inaccurate. Will Google, with its mounds of search and clickthru data be able to do better? Maybe, or maybe not. According to the product’s FAQ, “all results from Trends for Websites are estimated” and “anonymous opt-in data sharing setting in Google Analytics.”
HotPads.com provides interesting heat maps. I am not sure how accurate it is but the service looks very promising, especially if you are looking to rent or buy in certain area.
Above is a heat map of household income of San Francisco. The meter stops at about $61K, I wish it went further to something like $200-300K at least.
HotPads, which brought us the foreclose heat map, now offers a handy rent ratio heat map. The rent ratio is a home’s sale price divided by the annual rent of a comparable home in the same neighborhood. Looking at the rent ratio gives you a quick sense of whether it makes more sense to rent or buy in a particular neighborhood. If the ratio is high (red on the map), it is usually a good indication that you are better off renting. If it is low (blue on the map), you are better off buying.
