Aug 01 2008
Google Knol: Where’s the RSS?
If you’re launching a web project in 2008, I think RSS should be as essential a feature as, say, broad browser compatibility. This is ten-fold true if you’re launching a community-oriented information database like Google Knol. And yet they seem to have launched without any RSS support.
Wikipedia has had RSS since mid-2006. They more recently added the much sought after watchlist feed, so that editors could monitor changes to articles they work on.
As far as I can tell, there are no RSS feeds in Knol. A few I’d like to see include:
- A firehose feed of all new articles.
- A revisions feed for every article, like Wikipedia.
- A feed for changes to my knols only.
- A feed for comments on my knols.
I’m sure there are a lot of other ways one might slice the data ouput of Knol. And, in truth, I’m sure it’s a feature in the plans for future iterations of Google’s service. It is a little shocking that it didn’t get baked into version 1.0, though.
