Google has launched arguably its best new product in years, and no it's not a steam cleaning company (but more on that in a minute).

Knol is a new service that invites experts to write articles on niche subjects, with the idea that those articles will appear in search results when people go looking for information on Google. The bonus? The author gets to share in the ad revenue.

This is genius and a tremendously bold move on the part of Google to expand into the content business (something they've not done before - itself a big deal) and leverage their own ability to drive huge amounts of traffic to web pages, while simultaneously compensating the contributors.

Naturally, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is having to defend his position as Knol is inevitably being compared to Wikipedia in the media, and the new venture from Google could seriously challenge the collaboratively written encyclopaedia. At the very least it might tempt high profile Wikipedia writers away, drawn by potential riches at Google.

Google claims that it will not give its new project any special treatment in the search engine results, and that the 'knols' written by people will face the same search algorithm that all other pages do. On this subject I have faith - Google has historically shown complete fairness with search results. Only very recently for example did Google Translate show up in 1st position for the seach term 'translate', after years where Alta Vista's Babel Fish was 1st. Do a search for 'online video' and YouTube comes in at 14th position.

The name Knol is great too - short, sweet and subconsciously well known by people (the grassy knol?), but they have possibly made one major error in all this. It turns out that the domain name knol.com is owned by a Dutch steam cleaning business, and according to their website... they ain't selling!

Perhaps Google thinks that Knol is not really a destination site as the goal is for the pages to show up in search results. But I guarantee you this... if it takes off, as I think it will over time, that Dutch cleaning business may want to start their own fountain of knowledge site - the typein traffic is going to be huge! See the graph below for the spike in the steam cleaning website traffic in December, when Google first announced Knol.

I am actually quite excited by this project of Google's and I could easily see myself writing Knols as the mood grabs me.

But there's one major FLAW to both Google and Wikipedia's efforts, and not one that I can reveal at this time. Sorry if that's annoying, but you'll just have to wait and see...

Posted by Alx Klive at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Was doing a search on my computer today and happened upon these... all screenshots from my computer thirteen years ago.

As I have mentioned before I am no stranger to the 'hoard everything' party. In fact.. I may just be on the board of Directors. I have to say though, sometimes it's pretty cool when you find stuff like this.

Each screenshot tells a different story...

This was my first Mac - a Quadra 660AV. For the techies it had a 25mhz processor, a 350meg hard drive and 8 megs of RAM. (My current computer is 500x faster). On this day I was clearly excited to be watching Space Shuttle Mission 69 live over the Internet from NasaTV, using some early video streaming software called CuSeeMe. All running off a 14.4 dial-up modem. Apparently I'm writing a diary entry in an early Office type program called ClarisWorks (loved that program). I'm also listening to some fine tuneage using Apple CD Player. The actual date of this digital snapshot... September 16th 1995.

This screen grab is the only surviving record of the very first website I ever built, for CityTV in Toronto. It was a virtual tour of a major market television newsroom - designed to show viewers how all the different parts of a newsroom worked. Spread over about 15 screens it was made to be browsed without any need to scroll, something I still try to design for now. Am gutted I deleted the copy I had of this site to make temporary space on a hard drive. The station took it down shortly after, and deleted their copy too.

This was a very early idea for a companion site to WorldTV. MyWebTV.com was planned as a guide to live streaming TV and radio stations from around the planet. I don't think I ever launched it. I remember thinking it would be a nightmare to keep updated and fixing the inevitable broken links.

Do you have any old screenshots from your computer? Link to them in comments if you like. I wonder what the oldest screenshot from a computer is??

Posted by Alx Klive at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a manic three days at work.. as people in four countries have toiled day and night to get a new embeddable WorldTV player out the door - just in time for a high profile post on Techcrunch.com.

What started innocently enough with me filming a startup pitching session in London last week on my mobile phone, organized by Techcrunch UK, led to the video being used front and centre for the event wrapup article.

Mike from TCUK innocently asked me on Monday if the video could be embedded, and this spurred us to bring our development plans for this forward, and compressed probably what would have been two weeks of work into three days.

With the deadline fast approaching we had to throw caution a little to the wind and let a minimally tested widget loose in the wild on arguably the highest profile technology news website in the world. Not to be advised and definitely not encouraged. Having a widget embedded on the Techcrunch.com homepage is no joke. It meant that every one of the 100's of thousands of people who visit the page each day was downloading our widget from our beta server. This put it under incredible strain and was similar to 100,000 people all calling your phone number at the same time. Reassuringly, the server buckled, it spat, it swore... but it didn't break!

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Posted by Alx Klive at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For any budding entrepreneurs out there, Seedcamp is Europe's answer to Y! Combinator in the States, and is a way to get seed funding in return for a small stake in your business.

This year's Seedcamp applications are now open, and the deadline for applications is August 10th. While you don't need to be a UK business, you will need to confirm you can move to London between September to November this year.

For key dates and a full application guide, head on over to the Seedcamp website.

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The US based 'Center for Social Media' has just released guidelines that will be of interest to anyone in the online media and video mashups world about what exactly is 'fair use' under copyright law. The WorldTV Site Blog has more.

In other news, the doomsday scenarios of the Internet running out of capacity due to online video are (in this writers opinion) overblown, and some 'counter' news on the subject is probably overdue. This article talks about the plans to lay many more undersea cables in the next couple of years.

Posted by Alx Klive at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow, finally this juicy nugget in the release notes for Flash player 10...

Up until now, it has not been possible to have keyboard controls when running Flash in full screen mode (the mode where a video or game fills your whole screen). This means we've not been able to have keyboard control on WorldTV for such things as play/stop, forward, rewind on video controls, or for keyboard control of games like Free Tetris running full-screen.

Adobe has held off on this for a long time because they were worried hackers would start using Flash to imitate your computer's desktop in Flash, and get you to enter passwords or other sensitive data. It was a valid concern, and they've addressed it by only allowing keyboard access to certain 'non-printing' characters like the arrow keys, space bar, tab etc, starting with Flash 10. This is an excellent compromise... and welcomed!

Now we can see some super cool applications where Flash can take over your whole screen and allow keyboard control of the application, effectively bypass the OS, something I first dreamed about 10 years ago...

Here's the relevant text from Adobe...

"Limited Fullscreen Keyboard Access — In Flash Player 10, key events are supported for non-printing keys such as arrows, shift, enter, tab, space, etc. Limited access to the keyboard will allow fullScreen games and video controls with keyboard access in a secure way."

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)