This is has to be the biggest announcement coming from Google at the end of this year. Google is planning to take on Wikipedia with their own project titled “Knol” which apparently stands for Units of Knowledge.. While the title doesn’t really say much about the project, but they are definitely trying to create a more accountable version of Wikipedia, that will be monetized and will also also feature in Google Search Results, giving Wikipedia a run for its money.

Google really is playing smart here, by taking on the weaknesses of Wikipedia and building upon its strengths. Wikipedia’s biggest weakness to date has been the ability for anyone to edit it at any time. Say if I’d go about editing a Wikipedia entry saying that Mac OSX has had the most amount of Virus Attacks on it since a decade, the whole world would read it before someone else would come and edit it. Atleast with Knol, If I wrote something of that kind my reputation would be lost, and I stand to loose some money too, because Google plans to share revenue with Authors.

Another big weakness that Wikipedia has, is its sole dependence on Google for its traffic. What If Google decided to put Knol Pages above Wikipedia in the search results, the traffic of Wikipedia would take a nosedive. I’m not saying that Google would do this, but it really is a possibility.

Well Google would take advantage of its vast community, by allowing them to comment on pages and giving it ratings. Think of Knol that combines the best of Wikipedia, Digg, Blogs, Squidoo and other media that has really changed the way we find information on the Internet.

Marshall Kirkpatrick calls this a “game changer” on Read/WriteWeb, and I too believe that Knol could be a big game changer if it could build a loyal community in a short time. Knol really is going to be game changer, and I feel 2008 is going to be the year when we will see the mighty Google take on Wikipedia.

The Question if Wikipedia would survive or not is a different question, but some competition is always good. Lets see what Jimmy Wales has to say about this.

View Google’s announcement of the Knol Project here.

]]> http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/google-takes-on-wikipedia-with-knol/feed/ 6 http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/and-the-websters-word-of-the-year-award-goes-to-w00t/ http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/and-the-websters-word-of-the-year-award-goes-to-w00t/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:37:33 +0000 Karthik Kastury http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/and-the-websters-word-of-the-year-award-goes-to-w00t/ Read The Rest →]]> Hot on the heels, Merriam Webster just crowned “w00t” as the online Word of the Year 2007. 

”w00t,” a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in an online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.

Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse, said ”w00t” was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.

Although the double ‘o’ in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for ‘We Owned the Other Team’— that, you guessed it right, again comes from the gaming community .” I can already hear gamers worldwide screaming “w00t! is the word of the year” into each others ears.

But there is a little bit of Twist in this story. Like almost everything else, the word “w00t” does have a Wikipedia entry but the real shock lies in the fact that Wikipedia members have almost made up their minds to delete the w00t page from Wikipedia database on December 12.

Well the reason for this idea is that there are not enough facts to verify the origin of the term w00t and that the term has not yet reached general usage. Doesn’t that conflict with w00t being crowned as the word of the year.

Well anyway’s here my three cheers to w00t! for being crowned as the word of the year. w00t!

Image Credit : Digital Inspiration

Sites with a lot of static information — Wikipedia, any API documentation, web-based email — would be great to be able to use when no internet connection is available. But what if you’re a user that always has an internet connection? Then adding Gears to a site doesn’t do much, right? Wrong. Imagine your favorite website is now stored on your computer, and it syncs whenever there’s altered content. Whenever you look at the site, your browser is grabbing everything straight from your hard drive. Did you just make a search for your best friend on Facebook? Don’t wait 5 seconds the next time that search runs, have the results immediately! Meanwhile, save the webmasters’ precious bandwidth/server power!

Here’s the Greasemonkey script for Wikipedia (requires Firefox + Greasemonkey + Gears). For each Wikipedia article you want to save, click on “cache page” and the script will save the text and the images. It would be nice to make it work with any site.

Read More About the project on Google Code
Via Ajaxian