Google has finally pulled back the curtain on its so-called Wikipedia killer, Google Knol. We first heard that Google was looking at launching a user-editable encyclopedia-style web services late last year. But to be perfectly honest, a lot's happened in the last 7 months and we kind of forgot about it. Now that it's here, we're not entirely sure it's fair to call it a Wikipedia-killer.
Knol provides a place to find information about topics ranging from lung cancer to toilet clogs. What makes it different from Wikipedia is that while any user can suggest alterations to articles, the original author gets to decide whether or not to include those changes. In theory, this will help prevent people who don't know what they're talking about from ripping apart an article from an authority on a topic. In practice, since anyone can write an article on any topic, whether they know what they're talking about or not, it could be even harder to find reliable information on Knol than Wikipedia.
Knol's saving grace might be that users can write multiple articles on the same topic. So if you think you know how to build a better mouse trap than the 20 other writers who have published their own methods, you can write your own article. Readers can then rank stories so hopefully only the most accurate and/or helpful "knols" will find their way to the top of the pile.
Creating a Knol is fairly straightforward. You just sign in with your Google account and start writing. You can also import documents create in Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF or TXT file.
Many people may not have noticed this, but it's impossible to do a global search at Craigslist.org. It sort of makes sense, doesn't it? For most of the public, we'd imagine a global search would turn up useless results, but that only makes Craigslist useful for most of us. What about thoe crazy-curious folks that just need to know all about what's being offered, asked for, etc. around the world?
Marty Orgel submitted to Wired a short-tutorial on how-to do a global search of Craigslist through Google, and it's pretty easy. Just do an advanced search, and in the "Find web pages that have... all of these words" box, type in your search terms. Make sure "directory" is entered into the "But don't show pages that have... any of these unwanted words" box, and type "craigslist.org" into the domain box at the bottom.
The method worked for our global search of "time machine", which turned up 12,700 results from several regions including: New York, Austin, Northern Virginia, and San Diego. Most of them really had to do with a time traveling machine, so, yes, there are several crazy people in the world. Don't worry, though, we're pretty sure many of the listings originated from well-humored teenagers... well, we hope that's the case.
A lot of desktop word processing and text editing apps feature templates you can use to jazz up your documents -- or make them look terrible, depending on your opinion. Now Google Docs gives you the same option, with a new template gallery. There are over 300 templates, featuring everything from resumés to cards to calendars.
The selection of different templates is impressively versatile. Expense reports, presentations, invitations -- it's all there. Styles range from minimal (basic blue bars) to ostentatious (robots!). Something that immediately struck us as clever is the selection the Avery Dennison-sponsored themes, so you can print to those Avery labels and business cards that every office seems to be up to its ears in. If you use templates in your desktop writing app of choice, you'll probably also find a use for them in Google docs. Although the designs are hit or miss, there are enough of them that you should be able to find what you're looking for.
Google is rolling out a speech recognition tool that adds a whole new dimension to video search. Previously, if you wanted to search for a YouTube video, you'd have to rely on the title and tags. Now you can actually search for spoken text in a video. Well, in selected videos only. Right now the speech recognition is only available in a handful of political videos.
You can check out the new feature by adding the Google Election Video Search Gadget to your iGoogle page. Or you can view the gadget as a standalone page. Just enter a search term and Google will locate videos where the word is uttered. Google will also add little yellow markers to the timeline letting you know where the word occurs.
Google uses speech recognition technology to automatically transcribe the text of these videos and add them to an index. Videos uploaded by politicians to their official YouTube channels are indexed within a few hours.
Google certainly isn't the first site to combine speech recognition with video search. Blinkx and EveryZing offer similar services. But Google is the 800 pound gorilla in both the search and online video worlds.
If you've ever thought it would be a good idea to embed a chat widget on your web site, Google has another proposition for you: Why stop there? Why not embed a 3D environment, let users create avatars, decorate a room, and chat with one another? The company has taken the wraps off of Lively, a 3D social networking/chat service that does just that. You can create or join Lively rooms through Lively.com or you can embed rooms on any site using a small snippet of HTML code.
We got our first clue that Google was up to something in the social networking/virtual world space last year when a student at Arizona State University snapped a screenshot of the signup page for a top secret Google project. At the time we guessed that Google was building a Second Life competitor. But since it's a web-based service, it looks like Lively is more of an IMVU competitor. That should come as no surprise, since as VentureBeat points out, one of the founders of IMVU now works for Google.
Have you ever asked yourself, "Is someone else using my email account?" Well, if you're the cautious type, Google just added a few log-in monitoring features to its email service, so such paranoid questions won't feel so pressing anymore.
Wondering if you're Gmail account is open in multiple locations? Just look at the very, very bottom of the main Gmail page. It'll say something to the sound of: "This account is open in one other location." Click on the "details" link next to it to get taken to, well, a details page.
It'll give you the deets on the most recent sessions including the access type and IP address. It's not the end-all for email hijacking, but at the very least it'll help you point-out intruders. And if you don't see the feature yet, sit tight, Google is slowly rolling out the feature to all accounts.
There is a battle for the hearts and wallets souls of our young surfing children on the interwebs. Parents are obviously concerned about the appropriateness of the world wide web being a kid's playground, so are looking for suitable controls to help them feel their children are protected online.
We looked at 2 kids browsers, Glubble and Kidzui, and gave them a test spin as well as subjected them to an unscientific kid focus group. Check out our results after the jump.
Adobe's Flash technology has long been the bane of efforts to create a Web site or application that can be indexed by Google, Yahoo! or other search engines. What it lacked in search engine optimization (SEO), Flash made up in offering designers an infinite playground for creating rich-media apps, games and video.
But what good is an application that users can't find?
Google has rolled out a whole slew of new features for Blogger, the company's user-friendly blogging software. In order to enable the new goodies, you'll need to login to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com. This is where Google rolls out tools that might not be quite ready for prime time. But once you try out the new version, you'll probably never want to go back.
First up, Google has redesigned the post editor. It's still a what you see is what you get editor, but the toolbar looks much cleaner and placing images got about a thousand times easier thanks to a new drag and drop image handling. You can also easily resize images by clicking (or double-clicking in Firefox 3) to bring up a box that asks if you'd like an image to be small, medium or large.
Blogger in Draft also has better support for HTML and enables tables and other advanced HTML code to be placed in a post. And the preview feature brings up a new window so you can preview your post without leaving the editor window.
One thing to note is that Google has turned off the autosave feature, so you'll need to click the save button periodically if you don't want to lose your work. Autosave should be restored in a future update.
UPDATE: E.W. Scripps SEM Manager 
