Top Pick Best Knols of the Month
Glad to report that Peter Baskerville and I have completed a Knol that uses Google's algorithms to award Top Pick to the best Knols of the month. Our research traveled backward to pre-launch of Knol in July, 2008. For each month, we figured out Gold, Silver, Bronze and Honorable Mention awards. The algorithms we used were designed by Google, not ourselves. These algorithms are secret, but employ page views, star ratings, comments and reviews to place Knols in rank order. We were gratified to learn that our award Knol earned one of the awards. The results are here: http://knol.google.com/k/murry-shohat/top-pick-best-knols-of-the-month/14j3i4hyjvi88/60# As you can see, dozens of authors have been recognized for good work. As a final gesture, we split up the months and placed congratulatory messages on the winning Knols. Several of the winners have written back to thank us, and one winner has blogged about his success. We encourage more of this, as good work begets more good work. How nice it would be to have 10,000 people doing their best at Knol to earn one of these awards. Given the rapid increase in page views for this Knol, Peter and I are thinking about adding Best Knols of the Quarter and Best Knols of the Year. Opinions?
This Knol also harvests the mashup between Google Knol and Google Docs to simplify and automate the presentation. Each month is a separate Doc created by copying a Master template that already contains a formatted color table. Because of the mashup, it's easy to copy-and-paste algorithm results into respective cells in the table.
