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Darren Barefoot, who just co-wrote a book about Social Media has began a blog to become a primary source for information about the Google “Knol” Project. It is called Write Great Knols.

I’ve started this blog to gather information about Google Knols, a new product from Google that seems, at first glance, to compete with the Mahalos and Wikipedias of the web. I’ll cover Knol-related news, provide tips and tricks on writing effective knols and point to some great examples.

According to the Google Blog:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

You can view an example of a Google “Knol” below. I wish Darren success with this endeavor.

Relevance: How will academic institutions treat Google “Knol” citations? Are you encouraged to create a “Knol” yourself?

I have always been a fan of Google Scholar and I have used it as a first search tool for papers that I am looking for, for my research. What I really like is how I can how many people have cited the article as well as whether it is available on the web. Sometimes finding articles that I can download for free (i.e. university access provided takes a bit of detective work). As someone with an interdisciplinary background, I see the benefit for students from the perspective of computer science, anthropology, psychology, and Anthroplogy among other disciplines. I hadn’t thought about the benefit of google from a medical perspective.

At my university, I have found a cool blog by Dean Giustin, a biomedical branch librarian here called UBC Google Scholar Blog. The blog provides information about the power of search and how google scholar can be used to benefit the medical community.

I recommend reading the editorial that he wrote entitled “How Google is Changing Medicine”. It appears in the British Medical Journal from December 2005.

Google should consider creating a medical portal. Call it Google Medicine; design an interface with medical filters and better algorithms; lead to the best evidence (just don’t forget to consult with librarians about where the evidence is located). This kind of all-purpose tool is badly needed in medicine, particularly for developing countries.

The benefits of this system for information retrieval is also discussed in a newsletter for Health.ITWorld.com by Neil Versel, contributing editor.

Giustini says he realized the need for a medical search engine while attending a workshop on evidence-based medicine last summer, when he heard stories of physicians and medical librarians struggling to retrieve information. “It became clear to me that librarians were beginning to spin their wheels,” he says.

Relevance: I would be interested in seeing specialised versions of Google Scholar such as Google Education, Google Computer Science or Google Anthropology. These could then become places for people with similar interests to go to for information. However, how would interdisciplinary fields be represented such as Cognitive Systems and Ubiquitous Computing? I also wonder whether students at the undergraduate and high school level use Google Scholar to gather information? Is it provided as a valid search tool by librarians and academics?

This also shows how professions may be seeking non-traditional methods of information retrieval to supplement their search for knowledge. Could a medical del.icio.us also be a useful tool for information retrieval?

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