Write Great Google Knols

I received an email this morning saying that Knol had a lengthy outage last night. I don’t see anything mentioned on Knol Bugs and Work-arounds. Did anybody else notice the site going down last night?

Fellow British Columbian Rob Cottingham draws an entertaining comic about tech issues called Noise to Signal. Today’s features Google Knol:

On a Wikipedia talk page, I started a little discussion of how Knol is pronounced. Apparently somebody heard a report on NPR about Google Knol, and they say that it rhymes with ‘call’. That is, it sounds like the first syllable of the term ‘knowledge’.

That seems to make sense. Then a bit of debate ensued about difference pronunciations of ‘knowledge’, and the usual ‘reliable sources’ business and so forth. I gather we’re going to have to wait until a few Google employees say the word and it gets recorded for posterity. I’m liking the ‘knol equals call’ theory though–Occam’s razor and all that.

I just read this on the talk page for Knol on Wikipedia, and a quick Google search confirmed it. The terms (masculine and feminine, I assume) both mean, well, ‘fuck’. Here, for example, is a Swedish version of a certain notorious Tenacious D song.

From a Swedish-English dictionary:

knullar [²kn’ul:ar] knullade knullat knulla(!)
ha samlag (may be taken as offensive)

English translation: fuck