morrisseyed

So Google has officially opened up Knol to the public.  FYI, Knol is G’s next attempt to take over the world (or at least its information) by building a community-driven, open-source encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia.

Google gives us all the goods on its Googleblog, so I’ll let you do the reading yourself.  Do note, though, that they are encouraging people to use their real names on this.  Google argues that the authority we find in Knol will be vested in the authors and the author communities.  Whereas Bearcat258, Hellfire23f, or some other alias was once our authority for everything we needed to know from Wikipedia’s entry on X, the end-user will now hopefully be able to cross-reference the names of Knol’s authors against other pieces of information (ostenbsibly on Knol profile pages or by way of a google-search) to determine the article’s own veracity and quality.

Fair enough.  Google is correct in this regard.  Information and authority is all relative anyway.  Both are fairly dependent on identity.  We generally differentiate between truth and rumour when we can (1) verify the content of the statement, and (2) find the source of the knowledge.   I still find Google and Knol’s demands for open identity troubling, though.  I think the likes of Facebook and Google has destroyed anonymity on the internet, and I’m not always certain if that’s a good thing.  Google really does have the goods on us, and I wonder if I want this mega-corp being able to draw a character sketch of my person.  I’m still unsure what the implications would be if I were to merge my internet and IRL personas into one name/user.

Knol will be a success, truly, but I wonder what the wider implications of such ‘non-anonymous’ projects are..

Anyway.

This one is for the internet at large.

I finally picked up a twitter account.  It’s only as good as it is popular with my friends, and by all accounts, it is unpopular with my friends and therefore no good to me.  I’ll play with it a bit and see what happens, though.  Apparently, Twitter is the way to go when it comes to Web 2.0.  It almost makes me want to use my cell phone. almost.

Picking up twitter has caused some blogging issues to surface, though.  I’m a big fan of Wordpress and Wordpress.com, and generally keep my thoughts on WP.com’s servers, because they’re reliable, quick, and hooked right into Googlebot’s veins like some sort of IV drip - What one writes on WP.com, others can easily and quickly find on google.  yay.  Its WYSIWYG interface is the darling of blogging and CMS platforms, and its ability to integrate store and integrate images in posts puts the Blogger/Picasa to shame.

The problem lies in Wordpress.com’s strict No-Java policy for its widgets.  Java can do nasty things and can create massive security leaks, so in many way’s WP.com/Automattic’s policy is wise.  It keeps their blogging platform safe and secure.  But it prevents it from being robust, which is awful, considering the standalone WP.org manifestation is prasied time and again for its versatility.  Without Java, one can’t properly integrate all those “Web 2.0″ widgets we’ve all fallen in love with.  There is no way to properly integrate, for instance, Twitter updates, Last.fm charts, LibraryThing notes, or even proper webstats on the backend.  Yes, one could object and say I could certainly integrate a simple RSS feed of my Twitter status, but really now, I’ve done a lot of with text on the internet, and I don’t want to go back to 1996.  My days of dial-up freenet access through Gophers and FTPs are well in the past, and I have no desire to return to them.  WinSock was cute, but not cute enough.

This is an issue where Wordpress.com has fallen flat on its feet.  I would love to see the Automattic people offer more hardcoded widgets for various Web 2.0 projects, but after surfing its WP.com site for over two years now, I’m willing to say they’re well behind the curve on this.  It makes me want to drop WP.com altogether and go back to blogspot.  And since the majority of my faithful readers actually read this through my portable Feedburner feed, it is damn easy to make the switch with little hardship to be faced by either the writer or the audience.