Google Reader Friend's Shared Items.

Now Google reduced the effort of mailing shared items link !. It would be nice if it gets the friends from Orkut as well.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-are-friends.html

Google Knol

It is quite a surprise news from google. There are lot of articles discussing about the same. I find the following two articles interesting.

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2007/12/how-not-tospecial-knolgoogle-edition.cfm

http://www.krishworld.com/blog/open-source/open-media/wikipedia-is-safe-from-google-knol/

The advantages of Knol over Wikipedia are, it clearly defines the owner of an article and it provides a proper monetization platform. The former clearly differentiates between these two approaches. The later problem can be fixed and it should be as the current way of monetization for Wikipedia can't sustain.

It is an interesting move from Google. If you miss the recent blog post about assessment of Google-Yahoo results, you can read it here. Another goal of the project might be to collect more interests of user. I mean, as rating system is present in Knol, Google can precisely know which articles, style of writing etc hence they can better serve the ads for users as well. Google may further extend it and provides social networking functionality.

Yahoo tried to gather collective wisdom of crowd through Yahoo Answers and it replaced discussion forums, newsgroups etc and now Google have even bigger plans and trying to replace Wikipedia !!.