Friday, December 14, 2007

New Google Apps - Knol and Image Labeler

Google has announced an alternative to Wikipedia, called Google Knol. Authors (with their real names) will be featured prominently on the articles they wrote, and can optionally receive ad revenue. Articles (or "knols" as Google calls them) with high ranks will appear in regular Google web search results. For now, the site is in testing and contributors are by invite-only. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Also, I've discovered Google has an interesting image labeling game. This has been out for awhile, but I thought it was experimental, developed by some researchers at Carnegie Mellon. Perhaps Google hired them. Basically, you and another random person type in keywords for images that are displayed on your screen. For every word that you and your random partner match, you get points. It's perhaps a new way for the masses to add metadata to content.
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

Steve DiDomenico
Northwestern University Library -- Digital Library Systems Development
steve at northwestern.edu 847-491-4230 Evanston, IL

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