Knol Activity Feeds

Introduction

Activity feeds can be a great way to stay up-to-date with what a particular author is doing on Knol or how a particular knol has changed.  Have you found a great author whose work you really like? Have you started contributing to a knol and want to know when it has changed? Do you want to know about the changes those authors make without having to navigate to knol.google.com, find the author and examine their profile information each time?  That is what activity feeds are for.  By subscribing to a feed, and using a feed reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, the activity of authors can be available in the same place as your favorite news items and other feed updates.

Knol activity feeds are currently available on a per-author and per-knol basis.  Every knol and every Knol author has an un-published and a published activity feed.  The feeds are published using the Atom XML specification and help you to keep track of what your favorite authors and co-authors are doing.  You can subscribe to these feeds using any of a wide range of online and Desktop feed readers available today.  Activity on unpublished knols will only be available to the authors or owners of that knol.  Activity on published knols is available to everyone.

What is in a Feed?

Right now, we keep track of knol revisions suggestion decision, comments and replies in the author and knol activity feeds.  We hope to add more types of activity in the future.  Each time an author changes a knol, we publish a new entry into the feed.  The same goes for comments and replies. If an reader makes an edit to a Moderated Collaboration knol, then the change only is emitted to the feed when an author accepts the suggestion.

Any activities you perform on unpublished knols will only be visible only to you through a feed link on your profile page named: Unpublished activity feed or on the author/owner view of the knol.  Even when a knol is later published, activity that occurred while it was unpublished is only visible to you. 

How Do I Add an Author's Feed to My Reader?

Much of this depends on the reader you are using, but the first step is to find the author's profile page or knol page with activity that you are interested in.  Clicking on any knol author's name brings you to their profile page, like this one for Knol Help.  From this profile page, you will see link to the author's activity feed like this:

If you copy that link (on Microsoft Windows use a mouse right click, then from the menu select "Copy Shortcut" or "Copy link location") you will have all the info needed to add that feed to your feed reader.  The steps to add a new feed to a reader varies depending on the particular Reader service/application, but you can consult that product's help page for more information if necessary.