The Knol developers have been making little changes here and there in the weeks since Knol launched.

Indexing has been much improved (although there's still sometimes a small time lag when you add a new knol). The "My Knols" list now actually lists all of your knols. The Search Toolkit works more smoothly (why don't they just call it "Advanced Search"?).

Little icons have been added that make it possible to quickly identify content by its license and its collaboration model.

A "related knols" section now appears in the right-hand column on many knols.

Images can now have captions attached to them.

Reviews of knols now have a "Did you find this review helpful yes/no" button. (The knols themselves have star-ratings as always).

Unfortunately, though, there's still no way to receive notifications when you have edit suggestions contributed to your knols. And the ajaxy interface remains clunky when each page first loads. If you click on a hyperlink too soon after a page loads, you might end up clicking on something else because the page elements jump around a bit.

I received some extensive contributed edits to one of my knols [1]. The work was of very high quality, and carefully done.

I followed the link to the page of William Merriam, the contributor [2]. The comments on his profile are full of people praising him for his edits, so here we have an example of a prototypical "good samaritan", going around making improvements to other people's knols.

This has not escaped the notice of the Knol team, one of whom (Michael McNally) posted this onto William Merriam's page:

   "Kudos for being one of knol's first "power users". While we do
   not always have time to respond to individual users, we try to
   notice and learn from the more active and inventive members of
   our community."

Following the link to Michael McNally's page [3] leads to all sorts of interesting information about Knol. Michael identifies the Knol team as:

   Cedric Dupont (Project Manager)
   Michael McNally
   Ziga Mahkovec
   William Strathearn (who contributed edits to some of my knols)
   Ben McMahan
   and "many others on the project not listed here".

By the way, there are some great photos of the Knol team and their work environment in Wired's article covering the Knol launch [6].

Michael McNally links to some interesting Knol "meta-pages" such as "Frauds, lies and delusions found on Knol" [4], and to Reto Meier's Blogoscoped post about "The Real Problems With Knol" [5].

[1]: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/1xdiqvw5h03s1/3
[2]: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/27o0taic7sjc/1#
[3]: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/jQqtvf6n/d_qTeA#
[4]: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/21emvbllnk9fa/4#
[5]: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-29-n49.html
[6]: http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2008/07/google_knol?currentPage=all

Some other improvements to the editing interface which I forgot to mention earlier:

1. There's now a high-level way to insert and edit tables.

2. When you click on "Link" you can now type in a word or a phrase and generate a list of other knols that you might want to link to. Of course you can still link to a URL too. The generated list seems to be built from a search of title, subtitle, summary and alternate search terms.

"What's new" page: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/1ng4pryc7bgdb/11

"We now provide email notification when various operations occur on your knols. By default you will receive notification when there are new revisions of your knols or suggestions submitted to your knols."

"When you add a link, you are shown the top results of a knol search for your link text. "

Cool! Email notification is not working for me yet, but I look forward to it.

Hi Roger,

Thanks for spreading the word about improvements on Knol.

What's not working about email notification for you? (You can reply here or to knolhelpgoogle.com)

Also you write: "And the ajaxy interface remains clunky when each page first loads. If you click on a hyperlink too soon after a page loads, you might end up clicking on something else because the page elements jump around a bit." Sorry about that! We are working to improve the experience as the page loads.

Best regards,
Michael McNally (knol tech lead)

Michael, it's good to see the Knol team taking an active interest in the community that is building around Knol. That's the kind of thing which will decide how successful Knol becomes.

> What's not working about email notification for you?

Um, just that I haven't received any notifications. I'm not sure when notifications were supposed to be "turned on", so I've just posted a few test comments now to see what happens. If I don't get notification for these, I'll report it to the knolhelp address.