Knol Announcements and Release Notes

2009/7/2 Askal release.

• Moderating changes to your collections is now much easier with a clean separation between text and collection item changes.

2009/6/10 Pumi release.

• We added activity feed links for all knols, including this one!
• You can now translate any english language knol to any other language using the Google Translator Toolkit

2009/5/14 Yorkie release.

• Introducing Knol Collections.
  
• Link to "Embed knol into other web sites"

2009/4/27 Shepherd release.

• You can now associate a Google Analytics account with knols that you own.
• Support the Transliteration control in the title, subtitle and summary areas of knols.
• Adding search for comments written to an author, on the author profile page.
• Various bug fixes - including better support for non-logged in users coming to knol from other Google products in order to use Name Verification.
• Knol in Arabic is hosting competitions in conjunction with the Universities of  Assiut (search), Alexandria (search), Cairo (search), KAIAC-KSU (search) and KAIAC-KFUPM (search). We are receiving approaching 1000 new Arabic knols per day.

2009/4/27 Elo update.

• Knol in Arabic is hosting competitions in conjunction with the University of Assiut (search), University of Alexandria (search), and University of Cairo (search).
• Knol has launched an Indian Cooking Contest (search).

2009/4/15 Elo release.

• Comment moderation - authors can choose to require approval before comments may be posted to their knols.
  
• We added more language options for our Arabic and Indic-language authors.
• On the knol home page you can see the Most Discussed pages by This Week or by All Time.
• We moved the "import a file as a new knol" option into the Write a knol dialog, so it's easier to find.
• We provide some simple options to embed knol content into other websites. See Embedding Knol Content.

2009/4/1 Sharpei release.

• Authors now have the same edit permissions as Owners, except that Owners exclusively have control over deletion, adsense, license changes, and ownership changes.
• Authors can manage what interactions are possible, and what lists are shown on their knols. For example, authors can turn off comments, not allow unsolicited reviews, or hide the automatic table of contents.
• We now ask review scorecard questions questions on each knol page.
• Collaboration improvements: the edit button is more prominent, Moderated Collaboration is more reliable.
• We will be introducing an author statistics section on an author's profile page. Just start date and last active, for now -- but more coming later.
  

2009/3/30 Dingo update.

• We have retired the Share your knol feature.
• The Knol for Dummies contests is now closed, and is in a judging phase.
• Coming soon: we will be fixing some issues with access permissions and user profiles.
  
  • We will be upgrading the permissions of "authors" so that they will be identical to the permissions of "owners", except that owners have exclusive permission to: add or remove owners, delete knols, change the license of a knol, or change its adsense. This fixes a number of prior limitations such as co-authors not being able to change titles, subtitles, or summaries.
  • We will be using the First Name and Last Name you specify in your Google Account only if you checked the box "Display my full name so I can be found in search." If you did not check this box, we will use your Nickname. If your Nickname is empty, you become Anonymous.
• One of the knol developers is interviewed, in Arabic, on Al Riyadh.

2009/3/19 Dingo release.

• We turned on category browsing for languages beyond just English. We also changed the category browser so that it searches constrained by category, not just by keyword.
• We added an Indic languages transliteration tool. If you access Knol from India, you can spell out words phonetically in Hindi or in several other Indic languages, and we will transliterate the text into the native character set.
• Coming soon: we will be fixing some issues with access permissions and user profiles.
  
  • We will be upgrading the permissions of "authors" so that they will be identical to the permissions of "owners", except that owners have exclusive permission to: add or remove owners, delete knols, change the license of a knol, or change its adsense. This fixes a number of prior limitations such as co-authors not being able to change titles, subtitles, or summaries.
  • We will be using the First Name and Last Name you specify in your Google Account only if you checked the box "Display my full name so I can be found in search." If you did not check this box, we will useyour Nickname. If your Nickname is empty, you become Anonymous.

2009/2/27 Norwich update.

• We have added backlinks: see "Search for knols that link to this page" under Also Wrote / Related Knols.

2009/2/23 Norwich update.

• We have made changes to knol.google.com search to eliminate much of the indexing latency on our site. This does not affect how long it takes to appear in google.com search. See Knol Search for Q&A about that. A side effect of this is some reshuffling or rankings, and possible delays in correctly associating a language with a document.  We will continue to work to improve that.
  
• We have a brand new Knol Help page, with a reorganization of how bug reports and feature requests will be managed.
  

2009/2/20 Norwich release.

Old Home Page

• We have redesigned the home page. We have made categories more prominent, and highlight more recent knols and active authors.
• Authors can now remove categories. Visitors can vote categories up and down.
• About 70 bug fixes & minor improvements. Here are a few of the more notable ones. 
  • Changed search by categories so that it is really constraining by categories, not just searching for keywords.
  • Improve moderated collaboration's reporting of spurious changes.
  • Fixed some user permissions defects, which were sometimes blocking image uploads and document sharing.
  • Various UI fixes for Arabic knol interface.
  • Fixed the broken "Remove this link" in Related Knols.
  • Searches now accept these special operators inauthor, inowner, intitle,incategory, allinauthor, allinowner, allintitle, allincategory,

2009/2/13 Saluki update

• Knol is being featured on the google.com home page in Arabic.
• Various fixes to RTL (Arabic, Hebrew) script.  Several fixes to search, indexing & UI.
  

2009/2/4 Saluki release

• Added support for Knol in Dutch, Russian, Hebrew and Japanese.
• Added Category Browsing, an experimental new feature available in English only.
• The author profile page now gives you the options to view your list of knols or reviews in compact mode, and to sort them in four orders: last modified, creation date, page views (approximate), and alphabetical.
  • Note: alphabetical search won't work for about 24 hours, until we update the knol index.
    
• On the home page, we have an "Add to Google" which will let you add a Featured Knol iGoogle gadget to your personal Google home page.
• We now show AdSense on the bottom of the page in addition to on the right hand side.
  

2009/1/23 Shihtzu release

• We added a "Most Discussed" tab to the home page.
• You can filter by published or unpublished status when viewing knols on your profile page.
• We show badges now, for Top Viewed and Top Pick (highest rated) knols and authors. Weare working on badges for specific competitions (such as Holiday 2008 and Knols for Dummies).
  

2009/1/16 Puli update

• The publication of the 100,000th knol has been featured on the Google Blog.
• Minor fixes to internationalization, Spanish homepage, and search.
  

2009/1/6 Puli update

• We have brought the "Holiday Crafts" promotion to a close.
• We have knol authors organizing around several user-initiated efforts
  • Here is a January 2009 Bulletin Board to meet, greet and get organized.
  • Having trouble formatting your documents? Get HTML Help for Knol
  • Want to help translating knols? Need help translating? See the Knol Translation page.

2008/12/17 Puli release

• We have changed the links on the top of the page. Instead of listing "My Bio | My Knols | Settings", we now show a single link "Myprofile", plus a drop down list of links to other locations: My Knols,My Favorites, and Settings.

• You can now star knols as "Favorites". This adds the knol to a list of "My favorite knols". This is a private list, visible to you only, on one of the tabs on your profile page.
• You can create knols using templates.This is available for English language users only; additional language support will be added in a subsequent release. We have very few templates at this time, but we encourage Knol authors to create templates. If they look usable, we will feature them on this page.
  
• You can subscribe to an Atom Feed of authors' revisions, comments and replies.
  • To subscribe to your own activity, go to your profile, and you will see a link: Unpublished activity feed. Click on it to subscribe to activity occurring on your knols (whether the activity is on your published or unpublished knols.)
    
  • To subscribe to another author, go to that author's profile and you will see the link. Activity feed. Click on it to subscribe to activity occurring on that author's published knols.
    
• We added a Review Scorecard. When you write a review, you now have the opportunity to rate the knol's quality according to ten Yes/No questions. This feature is still a work-in-progress and will certainlychange as we continue to address the question of spam, plagiarism and low-quality content in Knol.(If you are an author interested in participating in an ongoing conversation with us as to how Knol authors can help improve the quality of experience on Knol, please join us on that page.)

2008/12/03 Greyhound update

• We started the Holiday Crafts homepage promotion.
  

2008/12/01 Greyhound release

• When you publish a knol, you are shown some options to help promoteyour knol, to facilitate collaboration, and to remind you ofnotification options.
• You can now indicate whether you found comments useful (+) or not (-).
  
• Cosmetic cleanup
  • The "Home" link has been removed from the log-in bar. Just click on the Knol logo to return to the home page.
  • The look of knol pages has been cleaned up and simplified a bit. We have omitted the "Affiliation" and "Keywords" fields, and moved some information such as star ratings over to the right hand side.
    
  • Search results now appear in a cleaner and easier to read three-column format.

2008/11/12 Scottie release

• Now you can invite anyone who comments on your knol to be an authorof that knol.  If someone gives great advice on improvements, maybe they'd make a great co-author.
• You can see a brief sparkline history of the pageview activity in a "Activity for this knol" section on the right-hand side.
• We are in the process of adding aggregate pageview stats for each author.  Look for more activity stats in the days and weeks to come. Example:
  
  
  Activity for this author's knols
  
  This week:

  6816pageviews
  
  
  Totals:
  62264pageviews
  
  
• Korea domain launch on knol.google.co.kr.
  

2008/11/7 Chinook update

• Knol is growing up, by steady increments: now and this weekend weare being featured on the Google homepage for most Arabic-speaking countries.

2008/11/3 Chinook update

• You can now queue email notifications into daily or weekly digests.
  

2008/10/29 Chinook release

• Knol is now available in French, German, and Italian.The links only show previews of our home page in each language; changeyour Settings if you want to use another language permanently.
• Knols now show how many times they have been viewed.

2008/10/22 Sloughi update

• We now use a Google Custom Search Engine to provide knol search results.  We hope this makes it easier to find great Knol content.  The Search Toolkit is still available for specific searches with special restrictions.

2008/10/14 Sloughi release

• Google gadget embedding! Insert YouTube/Google videos, Picasa album slide shows, GoogleDocuments, Spreadsheets, Presentations Calendars and Forms directly into your knols.
• We now list your Co-owners and Co-author in a section of "My Bio". You can also search for these using the Search Toolkit
  
• The bylines of each knol now include a short-list of the authors and owners rather than a single name. These multi-authorbylines are also in search results
• "Did you know?" tips can be found on the home page.  These highlight tips and tricks about Knol which you may not have known.  We have a "Did you Know" knol that lists all of our tips and tricks.
  

2008/10/8 Mudi updates

• We have featured Knol Debates, and the Google Clean Energy 2030 proposal.
• We are in the process of revising our "nofollow" policy.

2008/10/1 Mudi release

• At the bottom of Knol search result pages, we encourage you to Suggest an Author.
  
• If someone is putting abusive or spammy comments or suggestions to knols you own, you can defend your property with the new Blocking feature.
• The Settings > Generaltab has a language drop-down listing all supported languges.  Thepreference here takes affects your Knol account, and takes precedence over any language preferences you have set within your browser or in your Google user account.
• We are experimenting with a new feature, Knol Audio Playback.
  

2008/9/17 Beagle release

2008/9/3 Westie release

• The star ratings we show on knols now indicate how many people have voted.
  Example:202 Ratings
• We now have a Delete Images panel. Go to Settings on a knol you own, then click on Delete images. We show what images have been uploaded to the knol, how much memory each one uses, and your total image memory quota.
  
• We have  a few additions to the editor. You can now add and edit tables, and can add captions to your images.
  
• We have more search toolkit capabilities. You can search for:
  
  • Comments and Reviews.
  • Knols with specific licenses (for example "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0" or "All Rights Reserved")
  • Knols based on their collaboration mode (Open, Moderated or Closed).
    
• Some knols will begin to automatically show related knols.

2008/8/29 Jindo update

2008/8/21 Jindo release

• Knol now supports Arabic.
• The Search Toolkit lets you search by language.
• The home page has a "What's New" panel, which lets us post news, and highlights recently changed knols.
  

2008/8/7 Chowchow release

2008/7/30 Husky patch

2008/7/23 Husky launch

Other status and feedback pages