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.
GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain registrar, is one of three members of a power-packed joint venture chosen by the government of Montenegro to operate the new domain extension.
In support of the new registry, GoDaddy.com, Afilias Global Registry Services and Me-Net have created a new organization called doMEn (the word for “domain” in Montenegrin) which will act as the operational body with strategic oversight for the domain extension.
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.
This is a guide to blogging your nuts out when you are traveling or
outdoors without an access to a computer. Of course, we will be using
a cellphone PDA to blog ourselves nuts.
First and foremost, you can simply use an email client to write your articles.
I highly recommend that you publish your cellphone blog post
afterwards when you have access to your computer.
In the meanwhile, your draft blog post lives in your e-mail box.
Mobile blogging is really good for those of you on the constant go.
If you find yourself stuck waiting for a flight or even if you are on
a long bus commute, you can easily turn that into a valuable blog
writing time and let your ideas fly on your PDA keyboard. Of course,
we do recommend you get a full qwerty keyboard equipped pda.
The reason I made this post was also because of the fact that I am
actually sitting at the park as I write this blog post.
With no access to my computer but good broadband access to my gmail, I
am simply writing this during an outdoor party actually.
You see, great ideas on blog posts can be very productive even outside
your home office.
Perhaps, I will take this idea even further and try to blog 24/7 on the go.
Of course, it’s a lot harder to do linking and uploading images so I
try to keep that for later when I get back to my home office.
Now, there are numerous ways to also publish live on your cellphone but I won’t get into that as I don’t recommend it.
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.”
Well, this one’s pretty simple but a lot of people forget to put nofollow on links that are going out.
I don’t mean you should put nofollow on blogroll links but links like feedburner, flickr, and other free services you link to.
Don’t simply copy and paste as you are giving away valuable Pagerank to those free sites.
Well, that’s if you want to keep your PageRank as high as possible. It’s pretty much pointless to put a nofollow on those links anyways.
I know, I know, you want to thank those sites that give you the free service but realize that every link is valuable and if you are serious about gaining traction in the internet world, you should really pay attention here. Besides, those free services probably already got millions of free links from other bloggers who don’t give a shi*. I am just telling you if you do give a shi*.
Why do people forget about this simple fact?
Well, because most of the time, you end up copying and pasting the code from those free service sites. Now remember they don’t have a ToS that says you need to put a do-follow link in order to use their services. It’s only fair for you as a blogger to protect your Pagerank from going out to links like that. It’s actually very important that you watch out where your outlinks are going to as it will determine the number of search engine traffic you receive over the long term.
Now, don’t tell me you are on the do-follow campaign, that’s just something I won’t get into but it’s only hurting your blog. I think it’s smarter to play the safe side and make sure your do-follow links are only to those sites that you want it to go out and keep everything else, as I said before, a no-follow folks.
I maybe right or wrong but you might as well be safe than sorry.
Well, today I will explain to you a little details on how search engines work and how knowing about this “secret” can help your blog grow 2-3 times.
When I first started blogging, my blog was on a shared server with about 10 other sites. After my blog got “digged” several times, I had more visitors than my server could handle. So I did upgrade it to a dedicated server.
Now, what’s so special about upgrading to a dedicated server?
Well, let me first tell you the “secret” behind search engines.
You see, search engines “crawl” your site and index your pages based on the different words, keywords, etc…etc…
Now if the search engine can “crawl” your site within 1-3 seconds, you are probably okay. But if you are on a shared server and it takes more than 3 seconds to “crawl” your site, the search engine will not come back to your site as often and your pages won’t get indexed as fast and some pages will come up missing.
What you need to do is make sure your site is always at 25% of full capacity on the server.
So if your daily traffic is like 500 uniques, it should be able to handle at least 2,000 uniques.
Search engines WILL crawl your site much more efficiently and send you more traffic only if your server can handle it.
If you are on a shared server and it take the search engines 10 seconds to “crawl” your site, they are not going to want to send you traffic because your site will be very very slow and cannot handle more traffic.
You see, Google’s branding is about bringing the “fastest” information to you. Now if someone searched for something and the site loads very very slow, that’s going to look bad on Google.
Of course, you need the content first and foremost, but after that, it’s all about SPEED.
That’s the worst kept secret that no book will teach you and you won’t understand unless you’ve experienced it.
It’s logical and common sense. Now, go apply it on your blog and start receiving 2-3 times more traffic simply because your server can handle more traffic.
What do you need to do?
You need to forsee how much traffic you will be getting over the next 1-3 months. If your server slows down a lot, it’s time for hardware upgrade. If you don’t upgrade, you will lose valuable visitors.
Although the original story has been updated as, “This story is a parody and is not intended to be taken seriously,” we can take a lesson on how to drive traffic to your website through an innovative marketing. (or is it scam?)
Regardless whether the story is true of not, this concept has proven to bring about 6,000 backlinks and made front page of digg.
Interesting fact is that the story was intended to target the keyword, “credit card” on search engines and I bet whoever is behind this did profit a little just couples days of this stint.
What can you learn from this?
Well, do not go out there and write a fake story but use something “viral” that everyone will find “unbelievable” or “looks too fake”.
When money.co.uk posted a story titled 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers, the idea was that it could be read as a humorous parody piece that could get attention from social media sites, yield quality backlinks, and draw in hundreds of thousands of visitors. The backlinks would help the site achieve higher rankings on search engines, especially for the target keyword phrases that would include the words “Credit Card”.
