nobarking’s posterous

Just cranked up a new, team-written Knol to augment a major breakthrough at Google's Knol experiment. If you are concerned about Swine Flu, you may want to bookmark it because it could become "hot" as these things go. Just click the title:

H1Ni Influenza Real Time News Aggregation

Now, to the major breakthrough. After several months of planning, Google and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) announced a collaborative effort to instantly publish the fruits of fresh research about swine flu. The effort is named PLoS Currents: Influenza, and it lives as a "collection" at Google Knol. In the two days since it was announced, quite a bit of positive news has been generated. Here are the chief reasons:

• This "mashup" harnesses PLoS' commitment to open access for science information to Knol's instantaneous delivery model and implementation of a CCA (Creative Comments Attribution) license. In the context of the swine flu, this is ideal because it short circuits the usual slow and burdensome route for scientific publishing. My writing teammate, Dr. Krishan Maggon, is a biological scientist and he can't stop clapping about this.
• Since the PLoS folks want their collection to serve "for the rapid exchange of scientific results and ideas," we sensed a need to crossover from science to sociology. The rapid exchange idea should not stop at the University or research lab's doorway. In just two days, the PLoS collection has garnered thousands of page views. Our group would like to multiply those numbers by opening the University door. Our method is to aggregate related real-time news (and also provide some journalistic interpretation of PLoS content).

The PLoS collection employs a "vetting" technique based on expert collaborators. Articles in the collection have thus achieved sort of a peer review -- not full Journal-level review -- but sufficient testing to merit inclusion given the urgency of swine flu information distribution. This is really no different from the vetting offered by a magazine's carefully-chosen editorial board. But it sure is faster. Given my expressed concern in this blog about declining quality at Knol, we may be looking at a solution. Three words: expert-moderated collections. Thank you, Internet!

Yeah, I know. The gatekeeper theory returns. News is what the managing editor says is it. An old story. And a very good one. Given the decline in journalism at the print level, a new gatekeeper theory is completely appropriate. This one just might save Knol.

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