knol

Caroline McCarthy makes her triumphant return to The 404 and shows us her nerdy tattoo. It's way hot! Buzz Out Loud's Natali Del Conte and Justin Yu get back from their sweet honeymoon. Natali changed her name to Mrs. Natali Yu Conte. You'll see this change on her next appearance on the "CBS Early Show".

On today's show, we talk about Facebook's new redesign and how it will take over the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg apparently is not as awkward in person as he is on camera--though he's gotten nothing on Jimmy Fallon when it comes to nervousness. In addition, we've got some guilty pleasures including the "Mac Bong." Listen to today's show to find out why that has nothing to do with marijuana. And Best Buy tries to sell you busted cameras.

As always thank you for your voice mails and e-mails to the public. We're getting flooded with them, and we love it! 1-866-404-CNET (2638) or the404 [at] cnet [dot] com. Major props to brisbanelistener for putting up the Google Knol replacement for our Wikipedia page and for the greatest "Knol is Australian for beer" joke ever. Finally, today is the last day you can call in for our House of the Dead: Overload for the Nintendo Wii giveaway! We're still looking for a show motto, and the consensus is that we're either "The podcast of the future" or "The nerdy dirty." Entries welcomed.

Evidently trying to inject a little more life into its Knol project for sharing and storing bits of information, Google has begun a Knol for Dummies.com contest.

With a grand prize of $1,000, the contest isn't likely to stimulate the economy out of recession, but it was enough to spur Silicon Alley Insider's Eric Krangel to wonder why Knol is still alive. He's not the only one: my colleague Rafe Needleman suggested Knol is a good candidate for cancellation based on its buzz-free state.

Here's how I see it, though. Knol may not be … Read more

On the Internet, nobody except perhaps Google Profiles knows that you're a dog.

For those who want to endow their self-description with an extra layer of authenticity--helping put doubts, for instance, over whether their Profiles page may have been created by a scuzzy ex-boyfriend to rest--Google has carried over a feature from its Knol sites that let people verify that they are who they say they are. People who go through the process--Google executive David Glazer is one--get a green "verified name" tag on their profiles.

The name verification procedure comes from Google's Knol site, … Read more

I'm an expert on pit bulls! Really.

I just wrote a knol, a Web article akin to an encyclopedia entry, using Google's new Knol publishing platform launched publicly on Wednesday.

With Knol, Google is encouraging people to create more authoritative content that can be indexed by its search engine and monetized with ads. Unlike blogs, which tend to be casual and opinionated in tone, knols are supposed to be fact-based, informative, and well-sourced articles on a specific subject.

Google is dismissing the notion that Knol is its Wikipedia killer, but both operate under the premise that Web users … Read more

I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. It's bookmarked in my toolbar and almost without fail, there's a tab opened in my browser window, waiting for my curiosity to pique. I completely acknowledge the inherent limitations of the site: inconclusive entries, biased entries, missing entries, and anonymous authors. For the kind of research I do on the site (musicians, science questions, current/historic events), those issues don't bother me as I never need to source the data or refer to it in a professional sense.

When I first read about Knol, Google's entry into the user-generated content market, … Read more

UPDATE: We just learned that the escaped Eddie Davidson, the "spam king," was found dead after having apparently murdered his family. Obviously, we did not know this at the time we recorded our podcast, and we apologize for any insensitivity that could be inferred from our remarks. We will definitely address this horrible turn of events in tomorrow's show.

The recently imprisoned "Spam King" goes straight-up mint jelly and escapes from federal prison (check your barns and garages, Coloradoans), Yahoo Music makes the MSN Music mistake with the benefit of hindsight, and Walt Mossberg slams … Read more

Last night on the official Google blog, Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, announced that Google is testing a publishing platform called Knol.

It's being compared to Wikipedia and Mahalo. While it's a somewhat different take on knowledge collection, these comparisons are apt.

From what we know so far, Knol is a wiki-like platform. Authors can create topics, and there are tools to interlink articles and content, but as Manber says, an article, or "knol," is "just a Web page." Where it differs from a wiki is its focus on the author. All knols … Read more