After your recent announcement about opening Knol, I’m excited to share a few suggestions.

First of all, let me say how excited I am to see Knol come out to play. I’ve got nothing against Wikipedia, but just like there are different vendors for traditional book encyclopedias, I think it is great to have different sources for online encyclopedias. I think Knol will be a good supplement to Wikipedia.

I really like how you can choose different licenses for a knol, work and collaborate in groups, and receive adsense revenue for knols written. I’ve often wondered why I should spend time adding content to someone else’s site, when I could add content to my own and collect advertising revenue for it. With the revenue sharing model of Knol, I feel more comfortable putting forth efforts.

As a suggestion, I think you should also allow Google Analytics to be used on the pages to track traffic, similar to the way you allow Google Analytics to be used on Google Code projects.

One of the things I found confusing when I started using Google Knol is what the policies are for copying other sources, such as copying Wikipedia articles or copying other Google Knol articles. Although I’ve been able to figure this out, if you were to have a Google Groups discussion group for authors to discuss best practices, it would have been a valuable resource for beginning authors.

Finally, Google Knol is unique from Wikipedia in that it can allow multiple articles on the same topic. This can be a valuable incentive to allow more people practice writing articles. For example, I think Google should work with educational institutions, especially high schools, to provide opportunities for students to write knols for their school projects. Allowing high school students to write scholarly articles and reports which can then be peer reviewed online would be valuable preparation for collegiate studies.

Thank you for hosting Knol,
Jacob

BTW – From what I’ve been able to discover about copying articles, Wikipedia articles cannot be copied for use in Knol because Wikipedia articles are licensed under an license incompatible with Creative Commons licenses used by Knol. Knol articles can be copied with attribution, but if a knol uses the Creative Commons non-commercial license, then it cannot be copied to a knol displaying adsense. At least, that is how I read things.

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I’ve been building Google gadgets for a while now, and there is one thing I’ve struggled with: getting a gadget’s colors to match the colors of its container’s theme. That seemed like a mouthful, so let me break it down.

Suppose my iGoogle theme has lots of natural colors: green and brown. A gadget on that page would look better if it contained green and brown elements. But if my iGoogle theme had pink and purple colors, a gadget with green and brown elements might not look the best. A gadget’s color scheme should match the color scheme of the iGoogle container theme.

Already the iGoogle provides a few substitution variables like the __BIDI_* variables. The gadget container should pass color substitution variables along to the gadget as well. For example, __COLOR_LINK__ could be the substitution variable for link colors, allowing the iGoogle theme to set a common link color to all of the gadgets on the page. There could be a handful of different __COLOR_* variables that would be passed along for button colors, highlight colors, text colors, etc.

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Let me tell you why you are a winner in my book. Three letters, A-P-I. I think opening up your services through developer APIs is what gives Google an edge over your competitors. It is what makes Google more than just a web site. It makes Google a web service. Your latest efforts to make Google data more mashable is a good example of your continued efforts to support nice APIs.

Thank you for your efforts and keep up the good work.

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A few months ago I suggested allowing projects hosted on Google code to display advertising in order to collect revenue and support their project. One of the problems I saw in this model was that it could encourage project forking just so individuals could collect advertising revenue.

While collecting advertising revenue might work with projects with just a single developer, full-community projects with multiple developers would make it difficult to decide how to divide up the money among many developers.

What I might suggest instead, is that projects hosted on Google Code can display advertising, but rather than collecting the revenue themselves, they can decide to donate the money a non-profit organization that supports open source software. Google can pre-approve and generate a list of these non-profits groups, such that the open source project can simply select their favorite organization to receive the profits.

This is a win for everyone. Google can increase (maybe only insignificantly) its advertising market share. The non-profit groups receive extra financing, allowing them to further open source software development. Developers don’t win anything directly other than satisfaction for helping a non-profit (although considering many open source developers write software purely for satisfaction, this is not a small bonus), but developers will benefit from the overall strengthening of the open-source community. Google can also win on its taxes by being able to write-off the financial donations to the non-profits.

Please, Google, consider Google Code advertising that can help provide financing for open-source non-profits.

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Recently you added PDF support to Google docs. This is such a great feature that people instantly want it third-party apps which connect to Google Docs through the Gdata API. Please add the ability to upload PDFs through the Gdata API. If that support is already there, perhaps you should update your list of supported document types. Thank you for your help, and I look forward to integrating this new feature into my third-party app.

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I find myself logging into the AdSense site frequently, just to see how much money I’ve made by publishing your advertisements. It would be very convenient if you would place much of the Overview information into a Google Gadget that I can have on my iGoogle page.

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I think I have some good idea for you. So I’ve set up a new column on this blog so that I may suggest a few to you.

The first is that you should take a few weeks off. I’m sure that you don’t believe that Microsoft buying Yahoo! is a good thing for anyone. Unfortunately, the main drive behind Microsoft’s bid is competition from you, Google. Microsoft’s bid is also lower than Yahoo! would like, presumably because Yahoo! is struggling with a smaller market share, especially when compared to you, Google.

My suggestion is for Google to take a couple of weeks off. This would make Yahoo!’s stock soar out of the reaches of Microsoft, putting an end to the bid that would do no one any good. Now I’m sure that you probably don’t want to take a couple of weeks off, but you might be able to find other solutions, to help the situation, like placing Yahoo! advertising on your search results rather than your own. Whatever you can do to help Yahoo! look strong over the next month or so, might just be enough to discourage any takeover bid by the evil empire, Microsoft.

So until I write another Dear Google letter, I wish you the best of days.

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• 33/3
• pi dollars in euros
• 1 mile in furlongs

One thing it doesn’t do is date calculations. For example, how cool would it be to type in today + 155 days or 12:59am + 10 minutes?

Please Google, help me calculate dates!

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