Michael McNally

After one year knol in Germany, the plattform is still comletly unknown. No Link on the google start page, no promotion,.... If you still run the plattform als a "secret service" it´s better to switch off.

As an author, who wants to take the opportunity to earn money with knol, im deeply disappointed.

Hope you will do more for your baby. Otherwise I have to go back to a publishing house. They take care, that I get money for my work.

Michael, I understand that part of your new work involves language translations.

If so, I would hope that Knol and Google could look at adding Global English translation to the scope of works. Global English needs to be treated as a new language. It will not only help the predicted 1.5m 2nd English speakers expected to inhabit the globe in the next 5 years, but also makes the huge volume of English language content currently on the net more accessible to every language via better machine translation outcomes.

I wrote a Knol on this topic and discovered this site of scientists trying to automate this process. www.simplish.org/

Hopefully, Knol or Google will add this as a feature some time soon.

Michael --

Sorry to see you move to another post but I'm sure it's a career shift. Best wishes. Do we get to know the name of your successor?

Perhaps you'd help out the Knol faithful who have not moved by suggesting to your successor that page views and top pick algorithm have consumed looney weed. PVs haven't budged for about 10 days and the algorithm is wacko.

Speaking of Ad Traffic Quality, wholesale copying of quality Knols is taking place, with republication as new Knols that get adsense traffic. Good for the advertiser but not for the original author. Is this the tip of a wholesale plagiarism effort? Ad Traffic Quality will want to know. This issue cannot happen at competing sites.

Best regards,

When you say "previously I was with" it would be great if you could add some date information. Did you leave Knol in April 2009? June 2009? Is your new position a promotion?

I came to know yesterday, that a patent was filed in your name and William Strathearn on some issues of collaborative writing.

Even though the patent might have been filed long back, I came to know only today and congratulate you and Mr. Strathearn on this achievement.

I do not know whether the feature was already installed on knol or some more improvement to knol will happen at a later stage due to your patented process. But it is a good news for all of us associated with google knol.

I feel advertorials can be a good business opportunity for knol.

I collected and posted my thoughts on this issue in a knol.
http://knol.google.com/k/narayana-rao-kvss/advertorials-business-and-communication/2utb2lsm2k7a/1354#

Knol Author Recruitment - Double the Number of Knol Authors
http://knol.google.com/k/narayana-rao-kvss/knol-author-recruitment-double-the/2utb2lsm2k7a/1170#

http://knol.google.com/k/narayana-rao-kvss/california-state-usa-knol-authors-knols/2utb2lsm2k7a/1016#

MM,
Maybe you can help us with this or point us in the right direction.
MaiSao Trans became director of the Vietnamese Chapter of the Knol Author foundation. He has this question-

Hi, i am running into this difficulty if you could please help. I need the cite to be users friendly with Vni- fonts so I can update the Vietnamese Knol cite. This font is a user friendly and official used in Vietnam and internationally.

Thanks,

Mai Sao

Thank you for your time

I was thinking of changing my name from "the judge" to my real name. Will my links still be valid? Will that affect my search engine performance or page rank?

I tried to remove common stuff from my Market research knols yesterday, added different words and style in these knols, the way I had started originally. I had revised and improved my knols with only the original stuff with links to other knols in the series.

Today, I was surprised to see several of my knols now have 4* ratings after revisions in place of 5*?

Global Pharmaceutical Market Review & World Top Ten/Twenty Drugs 2008

My best knol had 8X 5* ratings before revisions and now has 9X4* ratings today? Earlier changes resulted in loss of quality badge. Do I revert to the old system with common and uniform sections?

I suggest that you create a new knol to better explain the Quality badge and star system changes picked up by your current algorithms?

Other knols to suffer downgrades are

Global Diabetes Market Review 2008 & World Top Ten Diabetes drugs
Global Respiratory Market Review & World Top Ten Respiratory Drugs 2008
Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, Diagnostic, Medical Device Industry
Market Research Reports Review (Data Discrepancies)

For the last knol listed, downgrading most difficult to understand as it points out the shortcomings of the $7 billion commercial market research industry. Anyone from that industry can give it a 1* rating to score competitive advantage? I can live with this and have no problems.

These knols are important for me and I get several positive emails from readers. Solicitation for articles from editors of journals has gone up once again both in numbers and frequency

Concerned if my own changes triggered the downgrades?

A random check of your 9000 quality knols shows that about 20-25% of selected knols dealing with health care were suspect and did not deserve the Q badge. These included some very dangerous health fraud knols which were notified to the FDA and to your team. Many other knols had contradictory statements, junk science and poor quality or outdated work.

Thus your algorithm is no better than visual measurements with an error of 20%

I read in one of Peter Baskerville knol, that your algorithm qualifies knols as spam or low quality if there are frequent changes/edits in knols and similar content in knols?

By the very nature of methodology used, there is similar content on most of my Global Market Research knols. On top these knols require frequent updating due to constant stream of upcoming data. I hope that your algorithm does not attribute low quality ratings to my knols due to regular input and similar content?