fidzu : ajax

Google just opened up Knol, its Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol puts a stronger emphasis on authorship and even encourages users to start different 'knols' for the same subject. Google is also serving up AdSense advertising on the site, whereas Wikipedia stays away from any advertising on its site.

In many respects, Knol is similar to Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, though its scope seems even more ambitious and its tools a bit more refined. It does, however, validate the Mahalo model.

Authorship/Identity

Knol puts a lot of emphasis on authorship and, somewhat akin to Amazon's "Real Name" scheme, authors can validate their identity on Knol through either a credit card or phone number.

The default setting for every Knol is "moderated collaboration." In this mode, anybody with a Google account can suggest changes to an knol, but the author has to accept these changes before they go live.

Authors can also invite others to contribute to their articles and given them the same rights as the original author.

There is also an option for authors to write a short bio of themselves in Knol. While this is interesting here, it will be even more interesting to see if Google might start sharing these Knol identities (and maybe even the users' reputation) among more of its properties.

Usage

Setting up a Knol is as easy as clicking the "Write a Knol" button. The text editor, too, is pretty straightforward, especially in the face of the often cryptic mark-up language most wikis use.

Knol uses a rich text editor, which presents users with all the typical editing functions, including basic formatting options, links (all set to 'nonfollow'), and the ability to add references.

As of now, you can not embed any videos or other content, except for the New Yorker Cartoons that Google incensed for this project for reasons only Google knows.

Users who don't want to write their own articles can review and rate knols. There is also an option to leave comments on every knol.

Creative Commons

Users can choose between three licenses for their articles, the Creative Commons Attribution License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and an "All Rights Reserved" license. The Attribution license is the default setting. Users can chose a different license for every knol.

Advertising

Authors on Knol can enter their AdSense data into Knol. Besides the cut Google already takes from the advertising through AdSense anyway, authors will get the regular AdSense payout for every click on an ad. This seems like a smart way to reward users who write the best (or most popular) content, while still making money for Google.

In the competition with Wikipedia, this might mean that some authors could divert their attention from editing Wikipedia articles to Knol. However, the question will also be if spammers can find a way of abusing this.

New Yorker Cartoons?

While there is no option to embed any videos or other content into the site, authors can embed cartoons from the New Yorker. This is done through a rather cumbersome process where users have to first search for a cartoon in the New Yorker store and then enter the ID number of the cartoon into Knol. Why Google chose the New Yorker's cartoon archive for this is anybody's guess, but chances are that Google will announce more content partnerships in the near future.

Is Google Going After Wikipedia?

Given how often Wikipedia results appear as Google's top results, it would make sense for Google to look at this and decide to start its own competitor. By incentivizing authors through AdSense and by giving its users simple, but powerful tools to start their articles, Google might just be on the right track. While Google keeps reiterating that Knol is not meant to compete with Wikipedia, it's hard to see how that wouldn't be the case.

Knol, of course, has far fewer articles now than Wikipedia, but as it grows, it will be interesting to watch if Google is going to give preference to its own pages over the Wikipedia results. After all, Knol carries Google advertising and Wikipedia doesn't, so Google would clearly have an incentive in doing so, though the potential public outcry if Google would try to do this might prevent them from even attempting it.

23 Jul 2008 8:50pm GMT

Kicking off Facebook's F8 conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the social network's translation tool can now be used by developers to translate their applications into different languages. The tool will work both ways - developers in English-speaking countries can translate their applications into the 15 languages that Facebook currently supports, while developers in non-English speaking countries can translate their applications into English.

Zuckerberg notes that Facebook has now been translated into nearly 70 different languages, with the official launch of them all coming soon. Overall, Facebook now has 90 million active users, with 2/3rds of them outside of the US.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Facebook Launches in Spanish
Facebook Launches Community-Driven Project to Add Foreign Language Support
Facebook Adds 55 More Languages to Translations Application
Google's AJAX Translation Apps Make You Global, Fast.
Facebook JavaScript Now Live
More Details Emerge on Facebook's User-Driven Translations Application
Google Analytics for your Facebook Apps

23 Jul 2008 8:49pm GMT

Here at San Francisco Design Center, the F8 '08 event is being held all day. The keynote with Mark Zuckerberg is the expected highlight of today's event, a year after the launch of the Facebook Platform. Most are expecting Zuckerberg to announce initial partners with Facebook Connect, which would come a day after MySpace had its announcement of Data Availability.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

The Daily Poll: Who's to Blame for the SXSW Keynote Fiasco?
Zuckerberg to Keynote SXSW Conference
Zuckerberg Saves SXSW with Open Q&A
When an Interview with Zuckerberg turns into a Revolt
Mark Zuckerberg Sells Stock, Makes Some Nice Pocket Change
Dinner Keynote at Web 2.0 Summit: Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfe
Mark Zuckerberg Spotted in Seattle

23 Jul 2008 8:35pm GMT

Hi,

I just downloaded jqUploader. I would like to display what is output
by the server side script that I submit my form to by a JS alert
message. However, I don't know how to do this and I can't seem to
find any such call back functions in the documentation:

[link]

23 Jul 2008 8:24pm GMT

Hello! I am translating Prototype/Scriptaculous code to jQuery. The
Prototype code is partly implemented in PHP functions. Can anybody
give me a hint how to translate the "onclick" (example attached) into
an according jQuery command which I can place into the head section?
THANK YOU!

<td class="subject"><a href="#" onclick="Element.toggle(\''.

23 Jul 2008 8:02pm GMT

Hi,
I've got what I think is probably a simple jquery question. I have a series
of anchors, and a series of divs later in the HTML. I want to bind the show
event to a div when the corresponding anchor is clicked. I have applied a
class to all anchors and all divs, but what is the best way to relate the

23 Jul 2008 7:53pm GMT

About the Author: Stoyan Stefanov is a Yahoo! web developer working for the Exceptional Performance team and leading the development of the YSlow performance tool. He also an open-source contributor, conference speaker and technical writer: his latest book is called Object-Oriented JavaScript. External JavaScript files block downloads and hurt your page performance, but there is an [...]

22 Jul 2008 6:41pm GMT

This article is the sixth in a series of YUIBlog articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5). In Performance Research Part 1, we discussed how reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on improving the response time and [...]

21 Jul 2008 4:03pm GMT

As a JavaScript toolkit developer, there are two features lacking in Opera that have frustrated me for a while: support for the contextmenu DOM event and the ability to override the default rendering of focus via CSS. When Opera released version 9.5, I was disappointed to see that neither of these features were [...]

18 Jul 2008 12:46am GMT

About 4 days ago, many have noticed that we had uploaded another minor bugfix release to our Google Code account. While there's, again, no new API introduced, more than 30 issues have been cleared and the codebase is growing more stable every day. The full changelog is available here if you want to find out if [...]

14 Jul 2008 6:16pm GMT

Subscribers to the Rails Spinoffs mailing list should switch to our new, better-named list: Prototype & script.aculo.us.

14 Jul 2008 3:51pm GMT

Soon after the release of jQuery UI 1.5, we were getting many useful feedback and issues entered in our bugtracker. Today, we're happy to release another version of jQuery UI which takes care of many minor regressions and a lot of unsolved issues. 1.5.1 doesn't add any new features or API changes, but fixes more [...]

27 Jun 2008 6:19pm GMT

The jQuery Team is pleased to announce the second annual jQuery Camp! jQuery Camp 2008 will be held on Sunday, Sept. 28, the day before The Ajax Experience, in Boston, MA (location TBA). Last year, over 100 jQuery developers gathered for a full day of jQuery sessions, which included talks from such big [...]

26 Jun 2008 2:49pm GMT

One of the main things missing since the forums have gone into read only mode is the Your Scripts section. We realize this and are working to complete our own plugin directory.

We're trying to assemble a comprehensive list of all our plugins. As part of this effort, we're asking all plugin creators to send an email to plugins@mootools.net with the following information:

• Plugin Name
• Plugin URL
• Plugin Description (one line)
• Plugin author name and link (if applicable)

At this time, we're only interested in collecting data on plugins which are compatible with the 1.2 release.

This is a temporary measure until we get a more interactive system in place.

24 Jun 2008 12:23am GMT

Topic: Extending Request class → Request.HTML stops working Message: I have extended the Request class to create this sort of functionality. However; this causes the Request.HTML to stop working. I think I understand what the problem is, but I am unsure if this should be considered impossible, or simply a bug? A simple testcase; running on top of 1.2 Request = new Class({ Extends: Request, initialize: function(options) { this.parent(options); this.addEvent('onRequest', this.onAjaxRequest); }, onAjaxRequest: function() { alert('waa?'); }, }); console.log(new Request({url: '/'})); console.log(new Request.HTML({url: '/'})); This code throws 'Request.HTML is not a constructor' when the second Request is performed. Any ideas on how to fix this?

15 Jun 2008 7:24pm GMT

Topic: modal popup w/ arrows and easy placement for 1.11 Message: Good job! Unfortunately it does not work with opera 9.5 :( The position of the modal window is messed up.

15 Jun 2008 4:39pm GMT

Topic: The forums are kind of down Message: Since the 1.2 release; the forum homepage says 'MooTools websites are under maintenance. We'll be back soon with new content.'. It seems to me someone forgot to update the index.php?

15 Jun 2008 2:33pm GMT

I speak for everyone the MooTools team when I tell you that we are extremely happy to announce the official release of MooTools 1.2. After a year of development and six months in beta, you might call us perfectionists. But now we're finally ready to call the 1.2 release complete and stable. For those of you who have been waiting to make the switch, now would be the perfect time.

Not only has the API been completely revamped, but there have been several significant changes to the site and the way the MooTools community interacts.

12 Jun 2008 6:35pm GMT

Today's interviewee is Ryan Johnson of Control Suite fame.

Ryan just launched PersonalGrid, a new file sharing and publishing web application, along with a complete overhaul of Control Suite, now renamed LivePipe UI.

11 Jun 2008 9:58pm GMT

Piotr Dachtera is the lead developer behind the recently-launched Live Chess, a Prototype-based, Comet-powered live chess game.

We talked to him about the client-side challenges he faced along the way.

28 May 2008 11:21pm GMT

script.aculo.us is from now on developed using Git (hosted at github) for source code management and revision control, and Lighthouse for bug tracking.

Why git instead of Subversion? Well, it simply rules supreme, and makes working with many distributed developers with lots of branches a snap. You can find a good intro book on Git on Peepcode.

script.aculo.us 1.xx development will focus on bug fixes only, while I'm working on the next version of scripty (post on that coming up soon!).

Bug tracker http://prototype.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8887-script-aculo-us

Repository for script.aculo.us 1.xx http://github.com/madrobby/scriptaculous

Note that if you're just using the library, this change won't really affect you.

If you have open bugs on the old Trac please port them over to lighthouse yourself!

I'm also working on a replacement for the documentation wiki (which, quite honestly, sucks); so stay tuned for some updates in the near future. If you want to help out with the documentation effort, please contact me. :)

09 May 2008 6:15pm GMT

With the initial release of Adobe AIR, a lot of web developers (myself included) are starting to get excited about developing rich web applications that run natively on the desktop across platforms. We've already seen several great AIR apps popping up all over the Internet, and thought we'd try our hand at creating one of our own.

Snippely was created by myself, Tom Occhino, and Valerio Proietti as our first attempt at creating a robust and useful AIR application.

15 Mar 2008 6:52pm GMT

This is a bugfix release that bumps script.aculo.us to version 1.8.1.

Mainly, this release contains some important bug fixes and optimizations in Prototype, fixes cursor keys in autocompleting text fields for IE and Safari plus fixes an issue with Effect.Morph on IE.

Download at http://script.aculo.us/downloads!

04 Jan 2008 3:15am GMT

This is the final version of script.aculo.us 1.8, which comes with Prototype 1.6.0 final.

The included final 1.6.0 version of Prototype brings the latest and greatest awesome new features -- be sure to check it out on the Prototype site.

See the announcement for more information and a download link!

08 Nov 2007 2:05pm GMT