Aug 01

Google Knol: Where’s the RSS?

Tag: Criticisms of Knol — admin @ 6:12 pm

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.

One Response to “Google Knol: Where’s the RSS?”

  1. David Petherick says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 2:53 am

    I agree it’s a big FAIL.
    It’s a very basic element which would help to involve Knol authors and draw in eyeballs to view those Adsense-wraped knols. An odd omission.

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