Managing Your Knol Author Profile

Changing your profile information

Your Author Profile within Knol is the same as your Google Account profile, used by other Google products. If you are logged in, click here to update your profile in your Google Account.

You can modify the way your personal information appears on your knols, including changing the following:

• Your name, as it appears on each knol or comment you write
  
• Picture
• Occupation (or title) and location

In more detail

In order to get started you need to be signed in with the account you used to write your knol.

Whenever you are editing a knol, your profile is displayed at the right. You can click Edit My Profile to update your name and settings.  Alternately, you can click the My Profile link in the top right corner. This leads you to your own profile page where you can also click Edit My Profile. 

If you do not see a My Profile link in the top right, double check that you are logged in and that you have either written a knol or a comment within knol.

If you want to provide a verified name, click on Verify Name to provide credentials.  You can either verify your name through the phone or by a credit card. Once your name is verified, a green Verified indicator will appear under your name.

Common tasks on the Edit My Profile page:

• If you want to setup your portrait image, click on Change photo link. The picture uploader allows you to select a picture from your computer, from a Picassa photo album, or from anywhere on the web. You will be able to crop and resize the author image as desired. When you are done sizing the image, Apply Changes and Save the results.
  
• If you want to provide your location and occupation, simply enter the text into the fields marked "Occupation" and "Where I live now".
• If you want to add links to your other Web pages (e.g., your MySpace page, Picasa page, personal web site, etc.), enter the URL and a description of the URL under Add a link to my profile and click Add.
  

When you have completed your changes for the first time, click Create Public Profile and your changes will be saved.  In future when you edit your profile, you will click Save to save your changes.

FAQs

I have followed these instructions, and I still see my old picture and old information!

You may experience a delay between the time you update your profile and the time the new information is reflected on your knols. This is due to various caching mechanisms, and rarely takes more than an hour.

How do I change the email account associated with my knol?

Suppose you have two accounts, old_name@gmail.com and new_name@gmail.com. old_name owns the knol. You would log in as old_name, visit each knol that you want to transfer, use the Settings > Owners > Invite More Owners option to invite new_name to co-own the knol. (Be very careful that you do not make a typo and accidently invite a stranger to own your knol.) Then log out, and visit the email in-box of new_name@gmail.com. You will have received 1 email message for every knol that you performed "Invite More Owners" on. Click through on the knol link within the emailil; that takes you back to knol but with the option for new_name@gmail.com to take ownership of the knol. Last thing to do: new_name@gmail.com can go through the owner's list and remove old_name. Whew! That is a lot if steps, if you want to transfer more than one knol. We might add bulk management options someday, but for now this laborious mechanism should work.

Can I delete my Knol Account?

Knol provides no separate action to delete your Knol account, but if you want to withdraw from using Knol, you can either unpublished or delete all of your individual knols.

Use caution: sometimes "permanently" really means "permanently".

You can also close your Google Account. You will lose the ability to modify your published knols, and your unpublished knols will become non-retrievable.

If I close my Google Account, can I recover the knols that were associated with it?

No. By closing your Google Account, you are requesting that we delete all information associated with it.