Baby guinea pigs

It’s so cute it’s sick. Day-old guinea pigs in little tea cups…wish I had thought of that when I had my first two, Sydney and Pip.

Knols, guinea pigs, and Flock

Ahh, the birth of the House of Choy! I maintained a blog very briefly a number of years ago, but found I didn’t have the time to post much on it. Nothing has changed in terms of time, in fact there are even more demands on my time now, but the difference is that I’m going to use this blog as a way to keep track of all the stuff that I’m coming across as I’m learning and reading. If someone else out there can benefit from what I’m recording here, then that would be a bonus.

Knols

Just read a Google blogpost about their new tool that will allow people to contribute their knowledge in the form of knols (units of knowledge) that will appear as individual web pages. Sounds kinda cool, I like the format of it already (as shown in the picture above).

• “The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors.” – Awesome. I don’t know if this will prejudice readers to the content, however I think it is nice for a change to know who is behind the writing.
• “Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content.” – Of course.
• “For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject.” – Right. So how do we know which one to read? Or will we be wasting time reading them all? Read the next one for Google’s solution…
• “Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.” - Uh huh. I’m not sure how this will work, but I will wait to see before I say anything else.
• This part I think I liked the best: “Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information.”

But then…isn’t this similar to what we’ve already got with Hubpages and Squidoo? I hate how these two are so full of ads though…I especially dislike Squidoo for that reason.

Flock

Found this photo on Flickr, thanks to my current favorite browser, Flock. I just discovered that I can make blog posts directly from this browser, it makes it so easy!