The New "Highest Rated" Tab: an Embarrassment
Today, Knol added a "highest rated" tab on the homepage that showcases newly created knols that have earned high marks from readers. You can select one month or all time. HOWEVER, one month is the default. It delivers writer Donald DePamphilis and only DePamphilis for 11 Knols that happen to have around 200 page views each but far more ratings than average for such low PVs
DePamphis is a good writer. He's a professor of economics. He seems to be using Knol to place case studies on-line. These 11 Knols look like the kind of stuff a professor might employ in a classroom. It's reasonable to suggest that students have been directed to these Knols as homework assignments. And that would explain the outlier stats on star ratings. Brown nosers!
I think it embarrasses Knol to dish up a new feature that is clearly broken from the get-go. Looking at Knol Help's current response history, it also seems futile to point this out to them. There are numerous serious unanswered complaints many days old that are ahead of this.
Is Knol sort of a stepchild application now? Probably not. Why would the engineers add a new feature if the service is on autopilot? However, Knol Help seems to have left the building. The engineers are in charge and no one is actually testing things before deployment, it seems.
Summarizing organically, imagine this scene. A new reader arrives at Knol's landing page, sees the tabs and selects "highest rated." Instantly, the screen fills with a list of Knols, all by one writer, all with the words Case Study in the title. Hmmm, only one writer? None of these titles interest me. Oh, well, Bye, Knol.
I'm embarrassed for Knol.
