I just thought of a way that Knol could make it. Google tracks our searches. This is common knowledge. If you don’t regularly clear out your cookies Google knows a lot about what your search habits are. Heck, they probably track IP addresses, so they know anyway. So, yeah, it’s a fact and you can get over it now. Google could use this, though to recruit authors for Knol. Thing is, what the internet needs are the very, very niche topics written about. You want to know a good couple-page bio on G. W. Bush? Wikipidea. That place is great for shit like that. You want to know about Singular Value Decompositions and how that could be used to approximate multi-dimensional data on a 2D plane? Good luck, Tonto. I tried that a few months ago and nearly went crazy doing so. Anyhow, now I know the answer. Google can probably guess what very niche topics you know something about (based on your niche searches) and what niche topics need to be filled out on the internet (based on unresolved searches). Heck, Google can probably even gauge your intelligence (especially if they do some semantic analysis of your Gmail emails). If Google can guess this, then they could, theoretically invite you to write Knols on things they’re pretty sure you may know and things that they know they need knols written on. They even know how valuable knols are to them and could maybe pony up some of that adwords cash up front, hear me? Holla.

Google’s new Wikipedia competition misses several at-bats. The three draws the Knol team has for the site that I’ve heard mentioned are:

1) you’ll get credit for writing the article.

Okay, how is that different from just putting something on your own website?

2) you can get money from the AdSense ads on the page.

Okay, how is that different from putting ads on your website that now hosts your article?

3) People will have an altruistic urge to benefit humanity.

Uh, no, they won’t.

And my final reason why Knol will fail is that there’s no obvious reason to use it. Either contribute to Wikipedia or post your own article on your blog.

If Google really wishes to aid search, they’d bring back Google Answers. There if people had really specific questions they could place bids and though they paid for the answer, the answers were then publicly available.

I’ve added the people who post most on my blog as “users”. So, when you leave a comment, be sure to use the email that we normally correspond with. Don’t worry, this email won’t be published to the internets.

I didn’t do it. I didn’t get the new 3G iPhone. Now I had planned to and even a few days before I was actively talking about getting one. Then, last Thursday, the App Store was activated and that changed everything. App Store is the gateway you use from your iPhone to get new applications. Before last Thursday an iPhone could only have about 20 applications. Now you can get almost 600. That’s 30 times the functionality with the same phone. It made me think, do I really need these new features? Is it worth $200 up front and a phone bill with an extra $15 a month (now $75 for a base plan) for faster wireless internet and more precise GPS? Answer: not right now at least. Let me finish playing with these new applications and get back to me.

The new apps, by the way, essentially make your phone an instrument of magic. I can use it as a remote control for my iTunes. It can listen to whats on the radio and tell me the song playing. I can even sing to it and it will (even with my voice) do a pretty good job of guessing the song. I’m looking forward to what will come out over the next year.

Dear Brian,

I understand that you are concerned about applications being deleted, I can understand your concern that you may have. I would not want you to lose any of your applications. Please email me back and let me know what if any applications have been lost.

Reset iTunes and try to sync your iPod again, if any applications are lost please email me and let me know what ones were lost and I will let you re-download them for you.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to email me back.

Have a great night!

Sincerely,

(name removed)
iTunes Store Customer Support