Digital Biographer™

The Secret to Conversing with Non-Humans by Chris Kieff - www.1GoodReason.com

“There are Non-Human Entities among us. Many people have seen them, or claim to have seen them. They move amongst us quietly, unseen by most. However, they carry immense power. These things can make or break companies, individuals, and careers. They can give you million$ of dollar$, or take them away.”

In a chapter entitled ‘The Secret to Conversing with Non-Humans‘ Chris reminds us of four important things you must bear in mind when you talk to the rather important non-humans you’ll encounter online : —

1. Be honest
2. Bottom Line up Front
3. Avoid using synonyms
4. Stay on message

>> Read the full story from Chris Kieff and 236 other contributors: Buy Age of Conversation 2 today…

David Petherick is one of 237 authors who contributed to the book ‘Age of Conversation 2‘. For the first 237 days of 2009, he is highlighting a chapter from one of his co-authors, briefly discussing their contribution, and linking you to their blog or online presence.
All proceeds from sales of Age of Conversation 2 go to charity.

2.0, authors, brand, commerce, conversation 2.0, search marketing, share, social media aoc2, Chris Kieff, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engines, search marketing, social media

This article was originally published here at Digital Biographer in January 2008. That’s Eight. A year ago. I think it still is very relevant a year later.

The significance of social networks is now starting to become obvious to the marketing departments of larger companies, largely due to two factors - 1) Traditional advertising channels are proving less and less effective and 2) Marketing and advertising agencies have started to realise where people are spending their time.

They have seen the writing on the wall - with one particular statistic likely to be a challenge for many a marketing manager: “Social networks will become the dominant channel for viral marketing campaigns - email has been the dominant channel for viral marketing campaigns since the mid 90s, but social networks will overtake it in 2008.”

Another fact that’s staring marketers in the face - a tipping point that only has one further hurdle to clear: “In October 2007, Social Networks accounted for 7.7% of upstream Internet traffic to all other websites, making the category the second most important source of traffic after Search Engines.”

The next hurdle of course is for social networks to become a more important source of traffic than search engines. That’s a whole blog of its own, however.

An article in this morning’s Financial Times is entitled “Business urged to woo social network figures“, and uses language very firmly couched in the tradition of ‘moving product’ and the pages of publications such as ‘Campaign‘. This all suggests to me that although businesses may have woken up, they have not actually smelt the coffee - they still have the urge to sell cereals.
Read more…

2.0, brand, conversation 2.0, corporate blogs, search marketing, social media Blog, Business, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, online reputation management, social media

This article was originally written for The Next Web Blog and appeared on Saturday, 17th January 2009.

Today, we found out that Google, where search is the core of its business, have added a link to new experimental features to its home page, which show options that can be added to the ’standard’ search.

The most dramatic of these is probably ‘Alternate views for search results‘ which, due to its nature, gives you different search results and rankings in different views of the same search query. So Search Experts take note: Page 1 of Google now has at least four different results!. Your site can be #1 in one type of search, but be invisible in others.

The standard Google search results page now also has “News about search term” appended to your search results as you can see below.

Google’s New ‘Alternate View’ Search Types

It is worth taking a look at this new feature for searches that include:-

• Search Results in Timelines [try this]
• Search Results on Maps [try this]
• Search Results in ‘Info Views’ which allow further refinement ‘on the fly’ [try this]
• One-click returns you to ‘Standard’ List View

You can obtain these views immediately using the standard google search interface by adding “view:map” “view:timeline” or “view info” following your search term - so rather than a search for ‘the next web’ you search for “the next web view:timeline”.

I’d recommend you check out these new search views, and also ensure that your site’s metadata is structured to ensure you appear in these new formats of search results.

There are also three other experimental search features at present -

• SearchWiki with sound - when you remove a result from your personal results, toy can have a sound effect play along with the animation whenever you remove a result. The sound is recorded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
• Keyboard shortcuts - use your keyboard to navigate results - so J Selects the next result, K Selects the previous result, etc.
• Accessible View - As you navigate, items are magnified for easier viewing. If you use a screen reader or talking browser, the relevant information is spoken automatically as you navigate.

Google continues to innovate and to develop its search technology, and in my view these new experimental features show that it’s still the very best at delivering search results. It’s also a wake-up call for you to ensure that the information on your web pages is given proper semantic structure - or meaning - because that will be a crucial differentiatiator as the amount of data online increases.

(Screen shots created by David Petherick using plasq’s Skitch)

2.0, commerce, mobile search, search marketing, social media experimental, Google, Search, Search engine optimization, search marketing, seo

Twitter is pretty boring until you start to follow people. And it’s also pretty boring if the people you follow don’t update more than one a week, don’t follow you back, or only tweet about themselves. So how do you find interesting people to follow on Twitter?

Enter Mr Tweet, a new service from @mingyeow and @ambivalence. Mr. Tweet looks through your extended network on Twitter to help you build relationships, and answers two very simple, and very important questions: —

* Who are the influential people I should be following?
* Which are the followers I should be following in return?

How it works is incredibly simple. You follow @mrtweet on Twitter. And that’s it. Mr Tweet will then send you a direct tweet pointing you to your personal report at the Mr Tweet web site. When I followed Mr Tweet, my report came through in about 6 hours - but due to rising popularity (Robert Scoble found it), you may have to wait up to 48 hours, especially if you have a lot of followers and / or follow a lot of people - but it’s well worth waiting for.

The report you receive (see my example report for @clarocada here) is produced online at Mr Tweet’s site, and allows you to either find influencers beyond your network or show which of your followers you should be following back.

The beauty of Mr Tweet’s reports is that you can assess whether to follow twitter users suggested to you on the basis of a great deal of information: -

• Examples of who, among those you follow, follows them.
• See how many of the people that you follow, follow them.
• How many followers they have.
• How many people they follow.
• A quick ‘following/followers’ ratio.
• A reciprocity statement - such as ‘frequently replies to non-follows’, ‘usually follows back’.
• How often they update - you may want to limit the number of ‘57 tweets a day’ people you follow!
• Link to their web site or blog as noted on their twitter profile.
• Brief biography from their twitter profile.
• View their last 5 tweets (A really useful touch).

The Mr Tweet Blog has just had its first entry, and they encourage feedback at Get Satisfaction. All in all, Mr Tweet is an extremely useful, very well-designed and beautifully easy to access service.

Follow @mrtweet and see who you’re missing…

Originally posted at The Next Web

2.0, digital biographer, microblogging, search marketing, share mr tweet, tweeting, Twitter

Haven’t you heard? LinkedIn is now in Spanish!

A subtle little detail caught my eye on the right hand side of my LinkedIn profile this evening - a little global map, and the world ‘language with a dropdown icon to its right…

It’s a beta version of LinkedIn in Spanish. All I need now is for them to add Russian, and I’ll have to use all three of my languages in my profile.

Just searching LinkedIn’s blog, I see that this was announced in late July but it’s been kept fairly low on the radar for some reason. Naturally, it makes the interface easier to work with for those with Spanish, rather than English, as their primary language, but it also signals growing focus on developing LinkedIn in the Latin American market, where LinkedIn say they expect to double their user base by the end of this year.

Spanish is the second most-spoken native language in the world (500 million people), after only Mandarin Chinese, and is the third most-used language on the internet (behind English and Chinese).

digital biographer, linkedin, online identity, search marketing linkedin, spanish

Twellow, the ‘yellow pages for Twitter‘, has improved its utility with the ability to create your own biography entry.

As well as being able to claim your twitter profile, and classify yourself in up to 10 categories (although I’m in 14 for some reason), you can also add your own social media links to your profiles on Pownce, LinkedIn, Flickr, FriendFeed, etcetera - as well as creating a brief summary and what’s termed a ‘bio’ or biography entry.

The search facility in Twellow includes the data in your summary and pick ups keywords and links used there, and your biography information can also include basic HTML, so links and visual formatting can be added. The summary is indexed in search - the biography does not appear to be indexed yet.

Apart from being a great way to find people using Twitter with similar interests, and pinpointing interesting people to follow, categorized Twellow profiles are also becoming visible in Google and Yahoo searches. So I’d recommend making sure you claim your profile at Twellow and add your details and social links to ensure your online visibility and credibility stay high. It’s free, and there are over half a million people listed there, so it’s worth spending a few minutes to make sure you’re visible, coherent, and linked up here.

2.0, authority, brand, googlicious, linkedin, microblogging, online identity, search marketing, social media online identity, online reputation management, search marketing, twellow, Twitter, visibility

A Kaplan survey of 320 admissions officers from the United States’ “top colleges and universities” revealed that one out of ten admissions officers has visited an applicant’s social networking Web site as part of the admissions decision-making process.

It’s not all bad news, of course - 25% of those surveyed said that viewing social network content had a positive impact on their evaluation. However, a greater percentage (38 percent) report that applicants’ social networking sites have generally had a negative impact on their admissions evaluation.

“The social networking frontier is a bit like the Wild West for colleges and universities — everyone is trying to figure out how to navigate it,” said Jeff Olson, Executive Director of Research for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions. “The vast majority of schools we surveyed said they have no official policies or guidelines in place regarding visiting applicants’ social networking web sites — nor are they considering plans to develop them.” For schools who reported having a policy, generally the policy is not to look at or factor these sites into the evaluation. One admissions officer reported, “Staff can visit them for narrowly defined reasons, but can’t go on a fishing expedition.”

Kaplan conducted similar surveys at business (9%), law (15%) and medical schools (14%), and it is interesting to note that there have been a whole series of ‘clean’ online-profile-building services appearing, which of course, are specifically designed for the college admissions process, and significantly, over a quarter of survey respondents (26 percent) say their schools subscribe to one or more of these sites.

Examples of these sites include Admish.com, Cappex.com, EdSoup.com and Zinch.com.

So it looks like college kids don’t have to worry too much about what material they place on Facebook or MySpace (yet) but they should certainly throw together a profile on a college admissions profile site to boost their chances of admission to their preferred schools. At the same time , it seems that there are a lot of institutions out there who need to draw up a policy of some sort (even if it’s a blanket ‘no online screening from social media’), otherwise they may lay themselves open to claims of bias or discrimination.

2.0, authority, brand, digital biographer, facebook, googlicious, online identity, search marketing, social media Admissions, Colleges and Universities, Education, Social network service, United States, University and college admissions

This month, Certain Host are giving you the chance to win a free domain name!

All you need to do to have a chance of winning your very own .com or .co.uk domain name is to give the correct answer to the simple question below, and send us your name and email address (which will be only be used to notify you of the winner). Good luck!

If you can’t see the entry form here, please visit the competition entry page.

Now, it should be well known to you that Certain Host offer a free domain name with three of their most popular hosting packages, but, we’re just making sure, and spreading the world a little.

Remember - this competition closes on 30th September at 6pm Eastern Standard Time.

PS: If you need a clue with the answer to this question, try looking at the web site of a certain reliable small business web host.

awards, corporate blogs, googlicious, online identity, search marketing Business and Economy, Domain name, Web Hosting, Web hosting service, Website, World Wide Web

I was checking my blog statistics just the other day, and found an unfamilar link to a story I’d written in January. I clicked through to find that Koollage, which produces a mobile version of my blog, had linked to my blog from their ‘press’ page, and someone had recently followed the link to my original story

But I was also intrigued to find that the widget version of this blog shows that is has been viewed 12,553 times since January 2008, when it was set up. That’s 12,000 visitors that never showed up on my web stats - rather more than I’d anticipated! The power of the mobile web is getting greater every day - and although this site is already optimised for viewing on iPhones, I see all of those stats through the wonderful Clicky.

The size of our audience is missing…

I think there’s a market for the company who can figure out a way to measure and pinpoint the ‘hidden traffic’ that comes to blogs and news sites through through widgets, RSS feeds syndications, friendfeed references and so on. These figures are not insignificant, certainly for a little blog like this, and knowing where an audience is coming from always helps when you’re working to address that audience - quite apart from simple curiosity.

Koollage Widget for Digital Biographer. Koollage were featured this week at DEMOFall08 in San Diego, and the beta version of their product is now open to the public.

digital biographer, googlicious, microblogging, mobile, mobile search, search marketing, share, social media facebook, iPhone, Mobile Web, rss, Web widget, Website, yahoo

Two terms have come to my attention in the last 24 hours. One was “Social Media Management Fees“, the other “Authority Blogging“.

Social Media Management Fees

Yes. The term makes sense, now that I’ve heard it.Mike Coulter of Digital Agency coined the term today, in a thoughtful blog exploring why what should be an invoice item adding significantly to the bottom line of numerous ad agencies, pr companies, digital agencies and general ‘new media’ outfits, isn’t.

I realise I’ve been charging customers Social Media Management Fees (SMMF) since 2006, but only now realised there was such a concise term to describe what I’m charging money for. I always hated ‘online reputation management’ because it always suggested spin and PR, and glossing over things - something I don’t, and won’t do for customers.

Blog Authority / Authority Blogging

I added the term ‘Authority’ to the list of functions for my company Clarocada in 2005. Clarocada Russia, Clarocada Emedia, which is now termed Clarocada Interactive, Clarocada Barcelona, and Clarocada Authority. I initially was aiming to help authors (those with authority, if you follow) to create a voice online, through blogs and social media, and to help them to promote their work to readers, and to perhaps gain other writing assignments.

I’d forgotten, of course, that authors are, in general, a complete pain in the butt to work with. (There are exceptions, but I am not one of them). So I moved more towards offering my services to those in business, who were idea-rich, but time-poor, in order to let them gain ‘Authority’. The term ‘Digital Biographer‘, which I was tentative about using up until it became the headline in a story on the BBC, has always been one that’s not entirely described ‘the full story’. If it’s good enough for BBC News, it’s certainly good enough for me.

I was also interested to note that in May 2007, Technorati coined the term ‘Authority’ to refer to the number of blogs linking to a site in their ‘Technorati Authority’ - so if 193 sites link to you, you have ‘higher authority’ than if, say, 6 sites link to you.

But it was when I read an article referred to by Chris Brogan yesterday, in his Google Reader Share List, where the term “Authority Blogger” was used to describe a service ‘to learn how to use a blog as a way for growing their profile, credibility and influence’. As I looked at the term, I realised this was what I should have called ‘Clarocada Authority’ three years back.

Never mind. A similar phrase did still appear in the description of the service for writers as ‘Blog Authority’.

Calling Names and Bad Language

It’s natural that as a new set of terms and services evolve, language evolves and new terms are created to describe them - some of which dates and is irrelevant very rapidly, and other elements of which becomes common usage. The term ‘new media’ is already looking a bit tired, but it was all the buzz around 2001. By the same token, the term ‘blog’ is far from universally understood even now, in September 2008. And don’t let’s get started on what ‘Web 2.0′ really means…

However, it’s nice to see that a term I’ve used in the past has come to roost in a niche it describes fairly precisely, and that others use the term with essentially the same meaning. As Mike Coulter put it - “I might be on to something.” An accurate way to describe the service I’m asking people to pay for is most definitely an example of good language!

2.0, authority, authors, brand, digital biographer, googlicious, online identity, search marketing, social media, Кибер-биограф 2.0, BBC, Blog, Blogger, digital agency, Google Reader, mike coulter, online reputation management, pr, Public relations, smmf, social media, Technorati, Web 2.0, World Wide Web

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” - Dave Barry

I don’t do meetings any more. I used to do a lot of meetings. But not any more.

The change from meeting to tweeting - where a series of brief exchanges (each a maximum of 140 characters) can make up the content - has been brought about by a variety of factors over the past 15 years or so - but here are the ten factors that I think are critical.

1. IN GOOGLE TIME
   I no longer have a phone book, business directories or yellow pages. Those were essential when I started my first corporation in 1993. But now, I use Google. As a result, I have less patience for slow ways of doing things - I am impatient. I demand speed, efficiency, and immediate results.
2. HOLA FONEROS 
   I have a laptop computer and a mobile phone, I can work from a cafe terrace in Banyalbufar just as easily as anywhere else. As a result, I don’t have the need to restrict myself to doing business with those who are within easy reach of where I live or work most of the time.
3. HOME OFFICE DRESS CODE
   I don’t need to have an office in the city centre to get my work done - I can do it from my home office. As a result, I don’t need to spend time travelling, and so I use that saved time productively. I also find wearing a suit in my own kitchen a bit pointless, so feel there has to be a very good reason to dress up to go somewhere - and my carbon footprint’s lower.
4. MY ONLINE VISIBILITY
   Whereas I used to have to push information out to people in brochures, newspaper interviews, in meetings, at trade shows, I now have online profiles at LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Facebook, Hyves, Flickr, Friendfeed, MyBloglog etc, and I have blogs and web sites that I can update easily in seconds. As a result, I don’t have to spend so much time introducing myself, and explaining what it is that I, or any of my enterprises provide - people find out about me before they meet me, or get to know me through following my activities online. People can meet me at airports because my photo is online. They can also decide whether they need to waste their time meeting me.
5. I HATE COFFEE 
   I don’t really like coffee any more. And I especially never liked paying £3 for a cup of it unless it was refilled all day and came with free wi-fi. As a result, when someone says - let’s have a chat over a coffee, I say “No. Let’s save the time and money, and spend five minutes now working out if we need to meet - and if so, what items on the agenda we can dispense with before we need to have a meeting”.
6. MEETINGS ARE GETTING SHORTER
   I arranged a meeting in London (yes, I do still sometimes meet people) with guys coming from Amsterdam and from the USA without ever using a phone - and although  we’d not met before, we have already shared dozens of pieces of information that made the business of the meeting last about ten minutes - and then we ordered some food and drinks. We then talked about other interesting stuff and new possibilities - not just ‘the business we need to discuss’.
7. CUT THE CHIT-CHAT 
   I can get to know people online by following their updates - or by looking at what they’ve said, or who they’ve been talking with, or who’s been talking about them - and so with this background, a lot of ‘chit-chat’ becomes unnecessary. As a result, I can filter out people, or filter them in.
8. YOU CAN DO THIS TOO
   You are reading this blog. You can send me emails, you can send me stuff without a courier, you can clarify things in Skitch, you can speak on Skype for free, you can send an instant message or a twitter. But you can do this as suits your agenda - and not be dragged into it by another party with an unknown agenda who wants 100% of your attention - NOW.
9. I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU
   I can now have customers who I never meet. That used to be very difficult. But now, I can see people, talk to them in real time, swap messages and files, send them sound files and presentations, have a video-conference with them… whether they are half a world away or live around the corner. 
10. LIFE’S TOO SHORT
    A friend of mine died suddenly this year. David was 42. He did not suffer fools gladly, and could summarise biblical volumes of information in a pithy, witty phrase. But he ran out of time. We all will.

“I prefer email and tweets and other online communications over telephone and face to face meetings because it allows me to manage my own time. When I’m meeting face to face the other person will automatically assume they have an hour of my time, which seems to be the standard meeting length, and will take all of that time to talk TO me.

In an email I might grasp their concept within 2 minutes and be ready with a reply. Other times I need to think about their message overnight. All of this is impossible in face to face meetings where an immediate reaction and 100% dedication is demanded.” 

- Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten 

So if you want to have a meeting with me here’s how to start the conversation:- Let’s tweet.

But what about you - what’s changed the way you handle meetings over the past few years?

2.0, authority, digital biographer, microblogging, online identity, search marketing, social media, Кибер-биограф meeting, microblogging, time management, tweeting, Twitter

‘Keeber-biograph‘, meaning Cyber-Biographer.

This is a term I came across today when searching through Yandex, the Russian search engine that’s been in the news recently, and which is rightly proud of the fact that, thanks to them, Russia is one of only four countries where Google is not the significantly dominant search engine.

The term came up in a blog by Maya Kim, in the context of an article by Steve Rubel entitled ‘Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch‘ and I was interested to see that only one of the three terms Steve had used had been expanded and given further clarification using English terms in the context of a Russian blog.

Steve’s Term of Super Cruncher was unchanged, and Chief Customer Experience Officer was simply translated into Russian as ‘Head of the Department of Quality Service for Clients’. But his term ‘Digital Storytellers’ was translated into Russian as ‘Cyber-Biographer’, and also expanded to include the English terms ‘digital storyteller, cyberspace concierge, blog butler, ghost blogger, digital biographer‘.

I recall the terms ‘Cyber Concierge’, ‘Blog Butler’ and ‘Ghost Blogger’ were used when BBC News 24 wrote about my work over a year ago, but I was surprised, and quite delighted, to find this reference being made. (For those of you who may not be aware of the fact, I speak fairly good Russian.)

I like the term Digital Storyteller - it’s a good description of some elements of my work. But I still think that ‘biographer’ is closer to describing things accurately:

biography

noun ( pl. -phies)
an account of someone’s life written by someone else.
• writing of such a type as a branch of literature.
• a human life in its course : although their individual biographies are different, both are motivated by a similar ambition.

2.0, brand, digital biographer, online identity, search marketing, social media, Кибер-биограф digital biographer, digital biography, Google, Russia, Search, Web search engine, Yandex

As someone involved in what I reluctantly term ‘online reputation management’, I carry out a regular search for my own name, and those used by my customers, and I was interested recently to come across my name in relation to twitter, but with the accompanying description of ‘Chef’. *

Now, I use the phrase ‘word chef’ to describe what I do rewriting online profiles, and include the phrase in my Twitter Profile’s brief description, so this was not a huge surprise, but I was surprised to find myself in a ‘Directory of Twitter Chefs‘ when I first came across Twellow.com in July.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I claimed my entry by just entering my twitter password, and then could add various social media profiles, add myself to directory categories that fit my activities, and was also able to find other people in twitter with activities and interests like mine (or, importantly, quite unlike mine).

I was placed into the ‘chef’ category because the word appeared in my twitter description and matched the taxonomy of the search categories. I’d advise you to check that you’re in the most appropriate categories - and have a browse for other twitter members in various categories.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

There is also a powerful search facility, which can either be directory-wide, or can focus on a specific ‘vertical’ - so you can find all of the Internet Marketing geeks with Tokyo in their profile, for example. It’s one thing to be able to search for what people are tweeting about, but it’s also very useful to know who the people on twitter are.

Simple and powerful idea

The site is a property of IEntry, known mainly for its advertising sites, but for now, there are few ads appearing on Twellow. I’m sure it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how they might monetize a Twitter Directory, although at present, those with the most followers, default to top of the page, with a filter to swap to showing those with the most recent twitter updates.

So - are you categorised correctly? Go to Twellow now and check your entry! I was amazed to see that in the Geeks Category, Robert Scoble hasn’t yet claimed his profile!

* I will be looking at some tools for monitoring online conversations later this month - make sure you are subscribed to the Digital Biographer RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter.

2.0, brand, commerce, online identity, search marketing, social media directory, twellow, Twitter

The Google Knol I created on the 24th of July entitled ‘How to Read the Russian Alphabet in 75 Minutes‘ was already appearing on Page 1 of a Google Search for “read russian” with 12,300,000 results following, just a day later.

I have updated the title within Knol from the one showing in the Google index, but that’s still a pretty impressive result for content that I created and put online only the day before.

And Google say they’ll pay me from any adsense revenue the page generates. This is part of the reason why I was interested in Google Knol from December last year when it was first announced. We’ll see how it develops, but it looks like a fairly effective way to share your knowledge, get good search positions, and also perhaps make some money. Until someone pinches your content… (to be fair, Google allow content to have three copyright models - the two popular Creative Commons licence types, and one of ‘All rights reserved’.

You may be interested to joing a Ning-powered discussion group that I created when first hearing about Google Knol, and which is now beginning to gain members and become active: Knol Roll on Google Knol .

View my page on Knol Roll

PS: You may also want to see Search Success for details of getting yourself to Page 1 on Google.

2.0, authors, commerce, knol, search marketing, share, social media Google Knol, knol, knolroll, Search Engine Optimisation, seo

I first wrote about Google Knol when the topic was first aired in December 2007 on Google’s Blog, in my article “Knol is on a Roll: Google’s new economy for online authors?“.

A knol is a term Google had created for a ‘unit of knowledge’ and the announcement created a great deal of interest and speculation, as much for the lack of details as for the excitement at what it might evolve into. Many commentators called it ‘Google’s Wikipedia killer’ but as I said then, that was simply a lazy and incorrect generalisation - but there was little very specific information. And today, many commentators are again likening Knol to Wikipedia - see related links below.

Today, Google has announced its public beta of Google Knol, defining a knol as “Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.” So from today, you can start to add your knol, or knowledge. This is a beta version, so of course there are rough edges, and Google will be looking to get feedback on many aspects and issues. (I for one found that I could not log at all in using Firefox on my Mac, but have had no problems with Camino or Safari.)

Some positive features are what Google calls ‘moderated collaboration.’ “Any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public.” Nice.

Google, why I can’t verify my identity?

However, one issue that seems a very basic oversight is that ‘Name Verification’ (so you can verify that you, as an author, are who you say you are) is only available for those based in the USA. The systems available for those Knol authors in the USA are via Phone or Credit Card checks. Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but there are telephone directories and credit cards used all over the world, Google. The raised credibility that Google cites arising from verifying yourself is therefore, at present, reserved exclusively for you only if you live in the USA.

So if you live anywhere outside the USA, do not send to know for whom Google knols, it does not knol for thee. (Apologies for that play on words to John Donne)

This is not the sort of even-handed approach you’d expect from a global player like Google - and the fact that there is no mention of OpenID or even Google’s own identity systems like Google Checkout or Adsense strikes me as a missed opportunity, even for a beta-stage development. The fact that one can share revenue with Google by electing whether or not to show Google Adsense Adverts on one’s Knol content makes this a very strange omission, and I fear, one that may open Knol up to a lot of spam entries or gaming.

I managed to log in and add a Knol to Google this morning entitled ‘How to read Russian in 75 Minutes‘ (I’ve proved that this works in a 75-minute lecture in 2005, by the way) but at present, my Knol on Reading Russian only appears in a search when I am logged in with a Google login (the login I use for Gmail, Google Reader etc), but it the knol is reachable with a link, whether or not I am logged in.

However, the range of ‘Featured Knols’ as samples that appeared on my screen today had me speechless - they covered Diabetes, Lung Cancer, Toilet Clogs and Tooth pain. Wow. Maybe that’s Google’s way of encouraging you to add better content - or at least, to add more cheerful and uplifting content!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Knol Opens Its Doors, Challenges Wikipedia [Google Knol]
• Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia
• The Difference Between Google Knol & Wikipedia Encyclopedia

UPDATE: The Google Knol I created yesterday entitled ‘How to Read the Russian Alphabet in 75 Minutes‘ is on Page 1 of a Google Search for “read russian” with 12,300,000 results following. I have updated the title from the one showing in the Google index, but that’s still pretty impressive.

authors, commerce, googlicious, knol, search marketing, share Google, Google Knol, John Donne, knol, Wikipedia