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Google launches Knoll

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Eating lunch today, I flicked through an old copy of Wired, and noticed a story about Google's 'Knoll' service, which is an interesting take on content creation.

It's basically a Wikipedia-like knowledge creation app, but the design focus is on identifiable individuals writing on a subject area; collaborators are also named.

Examples given have been created by Medical Doctors, Profs etc - Google are obviously trying to position this as individual expertise and opinion, vs. the collaborative, independent wisdom of groups in Wikipedia.

I'd read about it before, and reminded myself to take a further look. And just by chance, they happened to launch Knol to the public today.

There's a nice write up of the Knol team in today's Wired.

So, curious to see it in action, I created a Knol; recycling an old (2003) Academic paper I'd written.

You can access the Knol here.

A very smooth content creation experience - better than the Google Docs experience (surely it uses the same engine?) and a nice touch - embeddeble NewYorker cartoons, and simple Creative Commons rights setting.

Out of curiosity, I setup an AdSense account (I don't expect to earn a penny from that though!).

Very impressive content creation experience.

Whether this will get targeted by spam-like content creators will be interesting to see.

CommentPress

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CommentPress is a great initiative by the 'Future of the Book Institute' - a plugin/structural overhaul for a WordPress blog that enables documents to be presented, and commentable at a paragraph level.

It's used to particularly good effect to engender feedback for this UK government strategy paper on innovation.

via Tom Watson.

Getting Coca Cola to distribute rehydration salts...

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I coulsn't attend the 2gether ideas festival, but have been catching up with the videos and posts. Looked brilliant.

One particularly lovely idea, in action, noless, is this guy, Simon Berry, who had the idea of Coca Cola using its distribution network to bundle much needed salts into various countries:

"Our idea is: That Coca Cola use their distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to distribute rehydration salts. Maybe by dedicating one compartment in every 10 crates as 'the life saving' compartment?"

Brilliant lateral thinking - loads of updates here:

Simon's Blog (the personal one), and if you want to show support, join the Facebook group.

A 60-year revolution in surgery

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BBC NEWS | Health | A 60-year revolution in surgery

Of the millions of topics I know nothing about, medicine/healthcare is one of them (being so fit and all :-).

So this list of innovations in healthcare is quite amazing. I think the ability to treat cataracts, and the eradication of smallpox are both 'innovations' as well.

I also think how Cuba, through the constraint of not being able to afford reactive healthcare, unlike most other countries, innovated by shifting focus to preventative healthcare.

I think Cuba's healthcare innovation, like many great 'quiet' innovations are focused on getting in control of what you don't want to do, not what you end up doing (to paraphrase Steve Jobs).

Read at Work

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Read at Work

Wonderful - full screen 'Powerpoint' formatted novels, for when the boss walks by.

This is simultaneously amusing and depressing (I mean if you need this site, quit your job!)

A quick glimpse into Guy Dickinson's restless mind

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Having known Guy Dickinson, the proprietor of this blog, for 6 or 7 years, I can tell you that this is a man whose thoughts are never still. He calls it ADD, (as if it was something that shoudl be medicated away) but it's more like he is carrying on a perpetual-motion conversation with the world; he is asking rapid-fire questions instead of taking-for-granted assumptions, and making his own suggestions instead of waiting for someone else's answers.

It's been a couple of months since he and I have spoken, mainly because I've been trudging through a death march project at work, but I realized how much I missed talking with him as soon as I started listening to Nicole Simon's wonderful interview with Guy just before the Reboot10 conference held this past week in Copenhagen. In a little more than 20 minutes, Nicole and Guy cover a universe of topics, from the paradoxical interactivity of micro-presentations, to the novelty of the age-old process of food gardening, to whether easy access to knowledge via Google is actually making us stupid, to how book technology has shaped literature, to how we all may profit by giving away some of our best ideas. It's well worth a listen.

Near the end of the interview, while talking about giving away ideas, I was reminded of a quotation by Thomas Jefferson which seems to me to support Guy's argument and to describe Guy to a certain extent, too.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.