Incoming links: Knol
Very similar to OurBigBook.com!
People who worked on it:
- Udi Manber: project lead
- www.wired.com/2008/07/google-knol/ mentions various engineers. The original page had photos, including the full team photo, but these died, but are visible on the archive: web.archive.org/web/20151220002650/http://www.wired.com/2008/07/google-knol/.
- Ben McMahan: "Developed, launched, and maintained Knol", mentioned at:
- x.com/benjmcmahan
- www.benjaminmcmahan.com/ has email
ben.j.mcmahan@gmail.com
- Michael McNally (2007-2009), "project's technical lead": mentioned at: www.wired.com/2008/07/google-knol/,
- github.com/xiangtiandai Xiangtian Dai
xiangtian.dai@google.com - Mohsin Ahmed: can't find any online profiles
How to use Google Knol by Hack Learning (2011)
Source. One of the last users of the website for sure! The owner of that YouTube channel is a Mark Barnes:Jimmy Wales on Google's Knol (2008)
Source. Replying to a listener phone-in question WNYC radio, mediated by Brian Lehrer.
It was about to launch it seems, and it was not clear at the time that anyone could write content, as opposed to only selected people.
It was about to launch it seems, and it was not clear at the time that anyone could write content, as opposed to only selected people.
Jimmy then corrects that misinformation. He then clearly states that since there can be multiple versions of each article, including opinion pieces, like OurBigBook.com, Knol would be very different to Wikipedia, more like blogging than encyclopedia.
Google Knol: the future of academic journals? by Doug Belshaw (2010)
Source. Bibliography:
- Wikipedia & Knol: Why Knol Already Failed by gwern.net (2009). So there was some kind of monetary payment on the site. Interesting and sad.
- HyperCard: we are kind of a "multiuser" version of HyperCard, trying to tie up cards made by different users. It is worth noting that HyperCard was one of the inspirations for WikiWikiWeb, which then inspired Wikipedia
- Semantic Web
- NLab
- physicstravelguide.com/ Nice manifesto: physicstravelguide.com/about by Jakob Schwichtenberg.
- OpenStax
- www.ft.com/content/5515ec3e-0040-4d90-85a9-df19d6e3ebd2 (archive) Twilio’s Jeff Lawson: an evangelist for software developersYou can never be first. But you can have the correct business model. That company's website must have gone into IP Purgatory, and could never be released as an open source website.As a student at the University of Michigan, he started a company that made lecture notes available free online, drawing a large audience of Midwestern college students and, soon enough, advertisers. At the height of the dotcom bubble, he dropped out of college, raised $10m from the venture firm Venrock and moved the company to Silicon Valley.His start-up drew interest from an acquirer that was planning to go public early in 2000. They closed the acquisition but missed their IPO window as the market plunged, and by August the company had filed for bankruptcy. Stock that Lawson and investors in his start-up received from the sale became worthless.The website was called stubhub.com/, as of 2021 the domain had been sold to an unrelated website.He might actually be interested in donating to OurBigBook.com if it move forward now that he's a billionaire.
- Knol: basically the exact same thing by Google but 14 years earlier and declared a failure. Quite ominous:
Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
- leanpub: similar goals, markdown-based, but the usual "you own your book copyright and you are trying to sell your book" approach
- nature Scitable
OK, just going random now: