All Things Blogger

Characters and Setting

2009-07-10T23:39:00.003-04:00

Let's continue with more lessons I learned from Terry Wessner. This is how you write good fiction. You should engage the senses. In fact, try to stimulate all the reader's senses. You want to put the reader in the story. It must be concrete. Otherwise you get a shallow image and might lose the reader.

The narrator should describe the setting of your imaginary world. Don't let the characters do this with their dialog. That is weak. Often time some little details that the narrator shares can make a huge impact. You may have the narrator describe the setting as the character perceives it.

Here are some final points. The audience has to relate to your writing. It is key. You will also need to do a lot of research before writing. However 90% or more of the research will not actually make it into your verbiage. You still need to go and do the hard work. Good luck for now. More fiction tips to come.

Cause and Effect

2009-07-08T20:00:00.002-04:00

Today I continue sharing some of the fiction writing tips I learned from Terry Wessner at Anthrocon 2009. It is a good thing to construct a timeline of your whole story. This is not necessarily the order in which you will tell the story. It is just what happened and when in the universe you are creating. You may in fact want to start your story in the middle of the timeline, then fill in past details with flashbacks.

Here is a tip. It is best to avoid any types of prophecy in your writing. In other words, don't do flash forwards. That just tends to remove tension from your prose. Lack of tension could cause a lack of attention from your reader. I am sure you would agree that it is a bad thing.

Another recommendation is to go all out to demonstrate consequence. Follow through on this. Next time I will go into senses, details, dialog, and setting. Wow. That's a mouthful. Maybe I will just touch on those subjects next time.

Dealing with Details

2009-07-07T21:02:00.002-04:00

I am currently blogging a series about Rules for Writing. This information was presented by Terry Wessner at Anthrocon 2009. Here is an interesting quote from Terry: "People who can make mistakes are more interesting."

You should provide the reader with all the critical pieces needed before writing about the solution in your prose. If you delay this presentation until after you have already solved the mystery, you are going to have some disgruntled readers.

Likewise you need to deal with any details you draw attention to. Note that you do not have to fully explain the details. You just need to address them. This even applies when dealing with a red herring.

Terry did not have a high opinion of Hollywood movies. He did not think they always lacked entertainment value. But he did have this to say: "Hollywood entertainment is strictly coincidental." In other words, Hollywood is out to make money. Period. If the films happen to entertain somebody, that is just happenstance.

2009-07-06T21:40:00.002-04:00

I continue to share some of the fiction writing tips I learned at Anthrocon 2009. Terry Wessner gave a presentation on rules for writing good fiction. Here are some things I recall from part of that session.

This may seem like common sense. But idiot plots are just plain bad. An interesting plot may follow from a situation where the challenges encountered exceed a character's powers. The result of this imbalance can make a great story.

You should open with a strong hook. Then you should follow through on reader expectations. Along the way you can reveal motivations of the characters. Don't wait too far into your text to do this. The meat of your writing would then explain the implication of the character motivations.

It is boring if the reader figures everything out on their own too early. Then there is no need to continue reading. So you can provide some false clues along the way. Just make sure you also sprinkle in some true clues to keep the reader involved.

Rules for Writing

2009-07-06T01:18:00.003-04:00

This week I attended Anthrocon 2009. Terry Wessner put on a great presentation for writing good fiction. I figured I would apply these skills to my own blog writing activities. And I shall share some things I learned here in the next couple posts.

Meaning, also known as the theme, is important. Fiction is supposed to entertain the reader. Both grammar and spelling are important. You should follow these rules. Some of them may be broken, but you must compensate later in your prose for it to work. It is simpler to just follow the rules.

You should first get to know your target audience. Your goal as an author is to maximize the chance that the audience will get your theme. They don't have to agree with it. But they at least have to read and understand it.

Here is something your should know. Audiences will read meaning into your text based on their own personal experiences. They will also not accept any behavior that is contrary to what normal humans will do. You can write about unrealistic events and actions. However it must be at least believable.

Scheduled Post

2009-06-28T15:45:00.002-04:00

I downloaded a trial version of some new software. The marketing guy from the company asked me to blog about it. I figured I needed to kick the tires first before endorsing the product. There was a lot that I experienced from install to testing. So I had a lot to write about.

At first I thought I could fit my experience into one blog post. But that was resulting in a huge post. People don't want to read 10 paragraphs in just one blog post. So I decided to split the thing up into 3 posts. However I had all the information ready. This seemed like a good case for a scheduled release of blog posts.

I used the Blogger feature to schedule some blog posts for future days. In the end, I decided to schedule one blog post to appear per day. There was just one problem. The thing did not seem to work. After a day, the first scheduled blog post did not show up. What the heck? I looked on my Blogger dashboard. It showed the right date. But the post had not been showing up on my blog. I intervened and cancelled the scheduled post. Then I immediately posted the first post. We shall see if the second one works. If not, shame on you Blogger.

Recruitment

2009-04-29T17:23:00.003-04:00

My company does not have a Human Resources department that does hiring. That work is farmed out to subcontractors. Our team has the need to hire a number of people. However the recruiters were having trouble finding qualified individuals to interview. The problem is that we are looking for very specific skills which are hard to find. The skills are legacy skills that were prevalent 10 years ago. People have mostly moved on.

Most candidates provided by the recruiters were just not a good fit for the positions. I got a call from a team within recruitment about a new way to find highly qualified candidates. The recruiter had taken a look at my company blog. Luckily I had listed the skills I have and use for my job on there. I also had a blog roll for other great blogs that I read.

Here is the plan that recruitment had. They would use the blogs in my blog roll, in addition to any other groups that might have people who could do the job. They would then use those as sources for people to try to interview for our requisitions. So my corporate blog was working in multiple ways for recruitment. It helped them get insight into what I do. It also helped point them to like minded people to help find the right skill set.

So if you host a blog or post comments to other popular ones, you may have recruiters from my company watching you. They may further get in contact with you to see if they can get you to join us. Blogging is serving some extra purposes here. And I like that.

Google Reader

2009-03-25T16:40:00.002-04:00

I have been started to read a great number of blogs recently. Each day I want to read any new posts from these blogs. I accomplished this by visiting each of the blogs. This probably made the bloggers happy. But it was getting tedious, especially when I visited each of the blogs and there were no updates.

Other people who read blogs seem to use readers to manage the new content from the blogs they read. Since I use Google products for most of my new needs, I decided to try out Google Reader. I have to say that it was a little confusing to use this tool. I added all the blogs I read. However after I changed some of my settings, the screen seemed to change.

Since Google Reader is a tool with a web front end (you access it through your browser), I was able to hit the back button to get the screens looking like they started. I have seen a new gadget for blogs that shows blog followers. If I sign up to read blog content using Google Reader, do I then show up as a follower to that blog?

I am pretty new in the world of blog readers. Right now I am not sure what other products there are out there which do the same thing as Google Reader. I might want to do a quick survey of the blog readers before I settle on Google Reader.

Other Blogging Platforms

2009-03-18T20:20:00.002-04:00

Recently I have been working on a side project which requires me to create blogs on other blogging platforms. Some examples are LiveJournal and Wordpress. There are some other less popular platforms I have worked with as well. It is amusing to see how different platforms support and implement blogging functionality.

One thing that I really need to do is add links to my blog posts. This seems to be a basic, simple, and required feature in a blogging system. Here is what I would like to do. I want to specify the URL of the link. I also want to specify the text that is displayed in the blog for the link. This does not seem like unrealistic demands.

I have found that Blogger does not make this easy. By default it sets the URL as the link text itself. I do not like that. It also does not serve my needs. Blogger does have a work around where I can manually edit the HTML text of the post, and choose whatever text I want displayed. That feels clunky though.

Some other blogging platforms let me type the text I want to be displayed, highlight that text, and specify the URL it refers to. This seems to be the optimal approach. Why can’t everybody make it like that? Yes I guess if users have gotten used to other clunky techniques to achieve the same thing in a system, the developers may not want to make the change.

You should be careful to provide easy tools to allow the users of your system get their work done. Otherwise you may end up with unhappy users. When they become unhappy enough, they will leave to use another system. And you do not want that. For now I am sticking with Blogger because I have some blogs on there I have had for a while. But I am starting to look elsewhere.

Del.icio.us Is Not

2009-03-13T16:14:00.001-04:00

I was happy when I discovered the “del.icio.us” web site. This was a place where I could add browser favorite links. Then I could access them from any computer. I did not even share these links with the public. They were just for me to make my life easier when working with multiple machines. Delicious became my new web home page everywhere.

There were some annoyances with delicious. I would have to log back in every 2 weeks to see my private links. I guess they were trying to encourage me to share my links with the rest of the world. I lived with this. Delicious was a free service after all.

Then they went and redesigned the web site. It was hard to access my links. The site just did not look good. Perhaps they were trying to go Web 2.0. I don’t know. But as a user, I was disappointed. Don’t they know you are not supposed to mess with a good thing? They had a good thing going. Now the site was ruined for me.

I am a programmer. So I told myself there was no reason why I could not create my own delicious style page. After half a day of playing with some HTML, I have a nice page like the original delicious. Let’s call this my delicious.

I no longer need the real delicious web site. They have lost a customer. I know they did not lose any direct money from me since their service if free. But they should be careful. Their user base and market share may decline further if they continue to pull stunts like this,

Follower

2009-03-09T21:40:00.002-04:00

Recently I logged into Blogger to add another post. That’s when I noticed that my blog had a follower. To tell you the truth, I was not sure what that meant. Blogger Help says a follower is somebody who is interested in your blog. Well that sounds nice. I thought if you were interested in a blog you just read it.

Apparently Google has a “Following” gadget which you can put on your page. This allows readers to easily follow your blog. The thing is that I had not put this gadget on my blog. A little more Blogger Help research led me to understand that you can also follow blogs using your Blogger Reading List.

Now I am wondering whether I should add the Following gadget to my blogs. I would like to do whatever I can to make it easy on my readers to keep up with my blog entries. However I also want to make sure my readers actually come to my blog to read the content. I prefer that to just having them see my content in a reader somewhere else.

Blog Roll Gadget

2009-01-18T16:56:00.002-05:00

I used to have a Blog Roll on all of my blogs. This linked them together so a reader of one of my blogs could find my other work. These were implemented with Blogger’s link list gadget. It was a little clunky. But it got the job done. After a while, I found other uses for the space where my blog rolls went. So I deleted the link lists.

Recently I wanted to restore the Blog Rolls to my blog sites. When I was going through the motions to add some link list gadgets to my sites, I found a new Blogger gadget which was specific to blog rolls. This new gadget only asked you to put in your blog URLs. It automatically extracted and displayed the blog title on your page.

The really cool part of the new Blog Roll gadget is that you can show a previous of the most recent post from the blogs on your list. This is all done automatically. I imagine it will update when new entries are added to the blogs on your list. This is really handy, and makes my blog page look visually appealing.

You can bet that I have gone back and added this Blog Roll gadget to most of the blogs I author. It seems as though the Blogger team is still adding useful features to the Blogger platform. They had better do this. There are other choices for blogging software and platforms. I can not complain any because Blogger continues to be offered free of charge. How does Google do this?

Magazine or Web

2009-01-14T16:05:00.002-05:00

I finally got around to reading the latest issue of Redmond Developer News. It is very informative about all the technologies being released by Microsoft. This issue I noticed a new column in one of the first pages of the magazine entitled Dev Disaster. This column had some crazy story about a real life developer. It seemed very familiar to me.

When I got to the end of the column, I found out that the story was provided by The Daily WTF. That is a web site I enjoy reading from time to time. Perhaps I had already read this very story, and that is why it sounded all that familiar. I suspect this column will continue in future issues of Redmond Developer News.

It felt like I got short changed a bit there. I want to have original and new content when I read this magazine. I am not looking for some recycled web site information. To their credit, Redmond Developer News solicited readers to send their own stories in so they might be able to share. The other stories in the magazine are normally good breaking news that I cannot easily find elsewhere.

There is some benefit to having a physical print magazine to touch and read. It is nice when most print media are either going out of business or going to the web. For all I know, this magazine is funded by Microsoft profits on the software they are selling. I do know I get the magazine for free. For now I plan to continue to read The Daily WTF on the web, while still looking for original content in this print magazine.

Google Risks

2008-11-14T21:22:00.002-05:00

Some guy wrote a rant that his Google G-Mail account got disabled. So he used the Contact Us form to alert Google. He swore that he used a secure password. Therefore he doubts that his password was compromised. Google responded that they were looking into the problem.

In the end, the poor dude lost all his G-Mail history. This falls under the general risk of keeping your data in the cloud. I understand how easy this can be. Google has huge amounts of disk space. They have a nice and free product for you to use. You start using it and don’t look back. But you have to plan for the work case. That’s what I do.

You do not have to move away from the cloud to minimize the risks associated with it. For example, you can keep more than one Google account. That way you can split some of your email across multiple failure points. Yes this might cause some overhead while you check multiple accounts. However you can also use one account to aggregate mail from all the others.

The example guy from this story also lost his blog. This is something that is dear to me. I have spent the good part of a year blogging hard. I would hate for all that to go to waste. That’s why I have moved away from creating multiple blogs under one Google account. I am at the point where I create a new account each time I create a new blog. This is done even if I am working on a throw away blog.

I expect these problems to become more common as the industry embraces and moves into cloud computing en masse. You would be wise to assume that everything on the cloud will fail. The earlier you prepare for such a pending disaster, the better off you will be.

Blog Authority

2008-10-27T17:07:00.002-04:00

In 2006, Mads Kristensen stated on his blog that Deflate was faster than GZip. In fact he found Deflate to be 41% faster than GZip. Recently Jeff Atwood wrote a post on his Coding Horror blog about this. He figured there was something wrong with this comparison. Both programs use similar algorithms. He determined he would not take this information for granted. So Jeff did a test. He found the programs to have comparable performance.

Jeff used random HTML files. He varied the file sizes for his tests. Jeff did realize that the Mads post was from two years ago. However he used this example to make a point. You should not trust what you read on the web, especially in blogs. He said that blogs posting incorrect information are dangerous. The real danger lies in developers believing what they read on the web. The real interesting part of Jeff’s post was the numerous comments from developers.

Not all blogs are created equal. Incorrect information posted on rarely read blogs does not do as much damage. In other words, blog authority matters. You really should not trust anything you read. A blog is just somebody’s ideas. It is not hard fact. It is unfortunate that programmers are gullible.

There may be some hope. There were a number of readers who commented that they did not believe in Jeff Atwood’s findings. This caveat holds true – reader beware. Blogs after all are really not that important. You can read blogs to look at different approaches. However you should verify all that you read. That’s the due diligence that us developers must perform.

The Future of Blogging

2008-10-22T18:24:00.001-04:00

I read two articles/blogs about the future state of blogging. One was from Wired. The other was a response to the Wired article by Mark Evans. Both painted a somewhat bleak picture about the state of blogging. I take these outlooks seriously since I am very much into blogging myself.

The Wired article stated that blogging has been overrun with assorted marketing campaigns. There are very few real voices in the blogosphere. Blogs are becoming very impersonal these days. They are mostly professional sites that do best. It is hard for the little guy to get noticed. The true bloggers get a lot of aggravation like being insulted on their blogs. New formats are talking over. Twitter is the new Blogger.

Mark Evens responded to the Wired article. He is a guy that provides the Canadian perspective. He said that blogs showed up around 5 years ago. Now there are a total of over 175 million blogs out there. And by blogs, he means sites with text, links, and maybe an image or two. There is a very low barrier to entry. Hey. Most of my blogs are on free hosts. Even though the total number of blogs may be large, there were around 7 millions new blogs in the last 4 months. In other words, the popularity of blogging may be dwindling.

Is it true that Twitter and video logs are taking over? I know they are popular. However I continue to author a number of blogs. I also read a good deal of other people’s blogs. Perhaps it does not matter what other people are doing. One important side about blogging is that you do it if you like it. I also don’t care about others if people continue to visit and read my own blogs. It might be that blogs are not the hip thing to be doing. That is also fine with me. However I don’t think the sky is falling here.

Auto Blog

2008-10-07T21:57:00.002-04:00

I enjoy writing posts to some of my blogs. However sometimes it is a real chore. I want to add some value and provide some pictures for a bunch my blogs. But who has the time? Hey. I am a computer programmer. Why don’t I write a program to do this for me automatically? I shall call this project “Auto Blog”.

At first I think that I will just write a program that mimics me. In other words, the program will start my web browser. Then it will type in my Blogger account and password. It will upload some pictures. And it will type away in the browser. This is almost like a virtual me. It also seems like it will be a lot of work. I might be able to handle writing a program that mimics what I would write. But it will take some time to make the web browser think the program is me typing away at the keyboard and clicking the mouse.

So I do a little research. There must be a way for my program to communicate directly with Blogger. I find that there is. Blogger has an API that programmers can use. It even does this via XML which I want to learn as a programmer. If you do not know what XML is, don’t worry about it. I start to dig into the details of how to make my program communicate with Blogger. Then I find a critical piece missing. There is no way to programmatically upload images.

Ouch. That was the whole point to my Auto Blog. I want to share a lot of images and post some commentary with them. I guess I will have to go back to the drawing board. In other words, I need to take the path where the program simulates me typing on my keyboard and clicking my mouse. This is the hard route. I figure that the good things in life do not come easy. This is a prime example of that principle. Go me.

Maximize Clicks

2008-09-05T22:03:00.001-04:00

I have a number of blogs on miscellaneous topics. Recently I added Google AdSense to them. The goal is to make as much money as possible from users clicking on the ads in my blogs. To this end, I want to eliminate any distractions that might cause the users to not click on the ads. So I have tried to configure my blogs to not have many things to click other than the ads.

Therefore I have removed comments from my blogs. I have also hidden the labels for each post. As far as the sidebar goes, I got rid of the About Me link. I also ditched the blog history. In some cases, I have even gone as far as to eliminate the titles of each blog post. The title is clickable and brings you to a page with just that blog post on it. There should be no need for users to click that.

One of the few extras I did keep was the images I include in each blog post. Those are essential to a good looking blog. I did shorten the number of posts that are displayed on each page of my blog. This number was strategically chosen to be as long as the ads that are placed on the sides of the blog posts.

My hope is that this increases the chance that viewers of my blog see the ads and click them. The danger in these extreme methods is that my blogs will not remain interesting to keep the users coming back for me. So now I really need to engage the readers with some sharp writing and awesome pictures. I also need to ensure I post very often, as they see less blog posts per page.

I will let you know how this works out. For now I am already seeing an increase in the click through ratio on my popular blog pages. It is my hope that this trend continues indefinitely.

Blog Lessons

2008-09-02T18:19:00.002-04:00

I read a post on the Latest Geek Stuff blog. This is a blog written by omfut. His post was entitled “1 Year of Blogging, What I Learnt (sic)”. Some of his experiences matched mine from my 10 months of blogging. I thought I would comment on these findings.

Omfut has been blogging for 1 year. He said blogging is fun when you enjoy it. He cautioned bloggers to not let it run your life. Even though it is hard to write every day, that does usually increase traffic to your site. What is your goal? Are you just trying to gain more traffic to your blog? Or are you sharing quality posts? The best blogs are those for which the author has a true passion.

My initial goal getting into blogging was to make a lot of money. I have not been successful at that. However I have chosen blog topics that really do interest me. It is also fun to learn about the technical side of blogging. For example, I liked learning how to use Blogger. And it was a trip to get into the world of Google AdSense. I am finding more and more that I want to learn how to do web programming.

Here was a funny thing from Omfut’s blog post. He said he put AdSense on his web site just as an experiment (as opposed to making money). Yeah right. It is fine to try to make a few bucks on your blog by using ads. But don’t try to fool us into thinking the goal behind it is not to make money. You will be only fooling yourself. Just for that you get no clicks on your ads from me buddy. Aside from that, good blog post. Hopefully you will still be blogging 1 year from now. I know I shall be.

Got on Reddit

2008-08-25T22:40:00.003-04:00

I normally read Reddit to find good posts on programming. My default view on Reddit is to view the top “Hot” articles. This weekend I was surprised to find my Days of VisiCalc post coming in at item number 63 for hot programming posts. It was on page 3. This was very exciting as I did not even submit the blog post to Reddit. I could not help but log into Reddit and vote my item up. Hey. I wrote the darn thing, so I am going to give it a thumbs up rating.

My blog post that go onto Reddit was just my 2 cents on another interesting blog post about VisiCalc development history. Some comments on the Reddit submission said that my post helped call attention to the blog item I wrote about, even though it had itself been added to Reddit a couple months ago. Other comments stated that the blog I referred to was better than my own blog. This may be true since that blog was written by a guy who worked on VisiCalc.

My Redddit submission had received 16 points. Not sure if that means there was a net of 16 positive votes for it or not. I don’t think so as the submission received 42 up votes and 32 down votes. Whatever the point calculation, I am still happy that I can say that I was on Reddit. Thanks to Reddit user gst who submitted my blog entry in the first place. Props man.

Beware Spell Check

2008-08-14T22:18:00.003-04:00

Tonight I had a lot of blogs entries to post on my Software Maintenance blog. However I still had time to spell check each of my entries. One such entry took a long time to spell check. Then I made corrections and tried to post the results. I was not surprised when Blogger bombed and I lost my changes.

I was not phased so I edited the entry again, ran spell check, then successfully posted my changes. Then I went on with creating other blog posts. At the end I did a quick check on all my posts for quality control. Wouldn't you know it? The post that initially bombed still had some of the Spell Check highlighting in the actual published version. What a crock.

Luckily I was able to go back, rerun Spell Check on the blog entry, then post one more time. Now the yellow Spell Check highlighting is gone. What is the moral of this story? Double check your work, especially if Blogger acts funny when you are editing your post. I think there may be another moral lurking down somewhere inside me. However this rant is now over.

Blogger Broke Again

2008-08-04T20:32:00.004-04:00

I would like to upload a picture to show you an error message I continually get in Blogger today. The only problem is that the error happens when I upload pictures. This is a bummer. Recently I have been trying to post images with the blog posts I create. Now I cannot do this.

Wouldn't you know it? I am finally fed up enough that I want to help. So I try to figure out how to report the error. But when I get the error, my only choices are to go back to my post, or try again. Trying again produces the same error. I am determined. So I log into Blogger and see if there is a way to report an error using the Dashboard. Nope. I found a link to review known issues. None of the issues seem to be the one I am facing. What's a blogger to do?

In case the Google Blogger development team is paying attention, here is the error I get:

There were errors during upload.
The following images were not uploaded.
filename.jpg : This image could not be uploaded due to an internal error.
RETURN TO POST TRY TO UPLOAD IMAGES AGAIN

Company Response

2008-08-04T20:28:00.001-04:00

Some time ago I read an article from CNN Money about “when bloggers attack”. It outlined the best approach for a company to take when bloggers write bad things about the company or its products. In general the article recommended that you first check out the history of the blogger. See if the blog makes any difference to the big picture. Check if the blog is high in the list of search engine result pages for your company. You can always try to generate higher ranked positive hits in the SERPS.

The article warned you to not get emotional or hostile. The best way to handle such a situation is to turn it into an opportunity. For extreme cases, you can always hire a professional company to manage your online presence. This could be a costly option. And it may not provide any more benefit than what you can do yourself.

CNN stated that bloggers in general are fair. I am not sure if I agree with that statement. But let’s assume it is true. The article I read recommended that you provide the blogger with more information. That way they can generate more posts that at least speak the truth. Bloggers are interested in generating more content after all.

I can relate to some of the information in the CNN article. My own posts often criticize companies. However I have not been contacted by any companies following the advice from the article. But sometimes I praise good companies and products. Wouldn’t you know it? I have been contacted by people thanking me for giving them positive reviews in my blogs. Perhaps I am just a small fry. And companies that I slam are just ignoring me. I hope to become bigger and more influential. I also hope that I am not on the receiving end of bad blog posts too.

Link or Cross Post

2008-07-29T20:47:00.003-04:00

I was reading some new interesting blogs and came upon a blog by Kasper. There was no was to directly add comments to his posts. So I e-mailed Kasper and told him I liked his 8 ball problem. Then I added a post to my own Black of Hat blog called Eight Ball.

Later I started an e-mail dialog with Kasper. He was appreciative to my comments. He offered to link to my blog or cross post. Now I know about the idea of linking out to another blog. I e-mailed Kasper back and told him I had already wrote a blog post and linked to his.

Then I gave the cross-posting some more thoughts. In essence, Kasper said he would duplicate any blog post from my site on his own. He would then give me credit and link to me. I asked him to cross post my Loopback IP Address post. And he followed through and did so on his First Class Thoughts blog.

So I hope that I did the right thing. What method would be better for search engine optimization? What method will give me a better page rank? In the long run it may not matter much. But I am finding more people posting comments to my own blog. And I will want to know how to make the most of every opportunity out there. What do you think?

Google Knol

2008-07-24T18:18:00.001-04:00

Google has publicly opened up Knol. Google defines Knol as a “unit of knowledge”. Knol was originally launched in December of 2007 to a select audience. The project is headed by Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering.

Knol is similar to Wikipedia. The difference is that entries must have an author that put their name behind the work. There is no anonymous posing on Knol. Readers can suggest changes to a Knol entry. However the author controls whether those changes get applied to the Knol.

Google is positioning Knol to be the first thing someone searching will want to read. That being said, Google has stated that they will not artificially give a knoll more page rank than their existing algorithms calculate. There can be more than one knoll for any given subject. Readers have the ability to rate knols they read.

Authors can add New Yorker cartoons to a knoll. They can also monetize a knoll by adding Google AdSense to the knoll. However the positioning of the ads is fixed. Authors are free to link out of the knoll to other sites (including their own web pages). By default the entries submitted to Knol are licensed under the Creative Commons license.

Currently Google has a couple hundred knolls created. For the most part the knolls are related to the medical industry. I have been wondering what effect this will have on blogging, and more importantly whether this will be a Wikipedia killer. It is very exciting to get in on the ground floor of a new system created by Google. I encourage you to create a knoll on a subject for which you have expertise. Good luck.