Google announced this morning that Knol is opened to everyone. Knol is a Google Product similar to Wikipedia. Google describes Knol as "authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects."

The difference between Knol and Wikipedia is that the author's name is public behind the content. This solves many of the conflicts Wikipedia has experienced with credibility and accuracy. If an author is required to display his/her name, then it is their reputation on the line, and their edits, voice, and opinion are made public.

Many social networks or collaborative sites have a sort of community code or etiquette. For instance, there are "rules" to Wikipedia entries. Writing your company's entry or editing a competitor's entry is very much frowned upon. On Digg, it really doesn't pay to Digg your own articles or have all of your coworkers Digg your stuff. Votes from the same IP address are noted, and taken action upon.

I was fishing around to understand Knol's guidelines or best practices, and they do have a "content policy" that is helpful.

Knol apparently encourages voicing your opinion, and I suppose the safety net to this acceptance is the fact that the author's name and information are up front.

So what if Knol becomes stuffed with opinions and rants instead of actual facts and expertise? My guess is that it will be filled with both, but I hope Google will find a way to categorize or give authority to certain authors.

The guideline I find interesting is:
"COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY: You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service, unless you are in Cuba, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Syria, or Sudan. There are some commercial uses we don’t allow. We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website. We also don’t allow Knol pages that have the primary purpose of profiting from displaying ads from any publisher network, such as pages created with little or no unique content that exist only to display ads."

It will be interesting to see how search engine optimization consultants negotiate these rules, and what kind of results they can get by skirting them.

How's about some handy-dandy command-line keyboard shortcuts for *nix? (*nix = Unix, Linux, Mac OSX, etc.)

These are all based on Emacs, which I never use (I prefer Textmate for most coding and vim/vi for changes on remote servers). A dash (-) means hold the first button down while you press the second, and a comma (,) means press the first, release it, then press the second.

• Go to the start of the line: Ctrl-a
• Go to the end of the line: Ctrl-e
• Go back a word: Esc,b
• Go forward a word: Esc,f
• Delete everything from the cursor to the beginning of the line: Ctrl-u
• Delete everything from the cursor to the end of the line: Ctrl-k

And don't forget that the up and down arrows are your friend when you want to do something again!

Enjoy your extra 3 seconds per messed-up command!

Many of the staff here at Plexus are on Twitter. While it's hard to explain to other people (micro-blogging?!?!), we've embraced it as a way to share information, see what each other are doing, and, in some cases, decide on lunch plans.

While perusing an especially interesting query on Twitter's search today, I came across a tweet about using Twitter from the command line. Being the computer nerd that I am, this intrigued me. I did some Google-ing and found a few entries from people who had written scripts to make this possible. The best explanation I found was here. He just wrote a simple shell script that used curl to post a status via Twitter's API.

The code is pretty simple.

curl --basic --user "<User>:<Password>" --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

Just create a file with that line of code, replace the user and password with your account info, save the file as "twitter", put it in your /usr/local/bin directory (Mac), and make it executable. Now you can run the following line in Terminal to post your status:

twitter "Command line status updates FTW!"

Social media and blogging has an amazing reach, and I'm happy that Michelle Obama has decided to embrace the platform. Michelle posted today about her husband and the election on BlogHer.com. It is easy to tune out news that seems like old news when it is just election information rehashed and overly dissected, but as Michelle Obama engages the online community I listened.

While it is commendable that Michelle is working to engage, listen, and become a voice in the BlogHer community, I was disappointed that her post didn't "get" blogging.

Many of the phrases she used I have heard over and over on the news and on Obama ads. I was excited to read about Michelle's personal experiences, and get an insider's view on the election, but surprise!--it fell a little short of the candor I think people desire from a blog. She wrote for her audience, but almost played to exactly what they would want to her. Nothing is wrong with that, but I wish she could have stayed away from the cookie cutter language.

An example of what I wish her post could have been was actually in the comments:

"Michelle -
Thank you from me, and my daughter. I'm stealing a chance to tell you something that my daughter said. She is almost 10, and this is the first presidential election she has followed - obviously. She was an Obama supporter long before I was, while I was still on the fence. But we had great talks she and I about everyone running and what they were saying and the world we wanted to live in. It was historic, really, but very personal, to realize that my daughter's first election was, to her, between a black man and a woman. I've been in awe of that. When I told her how important that was to me, she just laughed and said, "Jeesh mom, they're just people!"

I cried. "MOM!" I'm sorry, it's a big deal. But when I asked her why she was such a strong Obama supporter, she said it was because he made her feel good. In discussion, it turned out that she meant that when she hears him speak, she feels hopeful, like she wants to do better, she feels inspired. I told her that I wasn't sure that was enough of a reason to vote for someone. She reminded me that I always tell her that if you BELIEVE you can do something, than you can, and that when you make people feel good, they are more willing to help you. She informed that that's what he does. Her contention was that inspiring us all to believe we can make a better world, and making us ALL part of the process was, in fact, good enough.

I love it when my baby girl makes things that simple, and that right.

But what really won her over, apparently, were you and your daughters. "They look like they could be our friends, ya know?" Um hm. I do know. Welcome in to our lives Michelle. Thank you for just being one of us. Amazing it took a 10 year old to make it clear how much that means, but it does.....

Thank you."

This comment was vastly more powerful than Michelle's actual post. Until politics aren't politics as usual, I'm not sure if blogs and social media are a great fit as a political podium or megaphone, but maybe politics could use a dose of the honesty cultivated in blogs.

I've been reading up on lead conversion - the percentage of Web site visitors that end up reaching the given goal on your Web site. It could include anything from completing a contact form, requesting more information, signing up for your newsletter, making a purchase, etc.

Lead generation is critical to the overall success of your site because it determines whether or not you have captured a visitor. It is the difference between window shopping and actually making a purchase - you want to get them inside the dressing room don't you? (pardon the shopping references)

Here is a list of some simple steps you can do to start converting more Web site traffic into qualified leads:

• Optimize your home page: ensure you have appropriate title tags and home page text - this will help you attract more overall traffic to your site, increasing the base number of visitors, giving you a better number to start with to convert
• Clearly lay out the navigation structure: if visitors cannot easily get to the information they are seeking, how are they going to perform the action you desire?
• Properly position your call to action: do visitors even know what to do when they get to your site?
• Site metrics are key: are you checking analytics? Google's free tool shows you an incredible amount of information about your site. At the most basic level, the “site overlay” feature tells you where people click, where they don’t click and where they leave your site. Also important is the bounce rate - how high the percentage of traffic leaving your site from the home page (before they navigate anywhere else). This information is key to finding out what site adjustments may be needed to retain better traffic.
• Web site features: what are you offering your audience? Few tools tell you anything about your “non-customers” – that is, the visitors who arrived at your site then left for whatever reason. You rarely get feedback from these people. They are unlikely to phone up, but they might just be persuaded to use a Live Chat feature, for example.
• Usability: there are free tests out there that will help you assess your site.
• Eye Tracking: tools that show you what people are seeing but do not click. There are services that provide you with this information, here is one.
• Click Mapping: see where the most popular parts of your site are. Crazy Eggs a free service that allows you to see the parts of your page that your visitors click on. ClickTale s similar, but has the advantage of recording Flash movies of your visitors’ browsing sessions, and allowing you to see how far people scroll down your pages.
• And, finally, listen to those who frequently use your site. Ask for their suggestions and be sure to check out our SEO services to get more traffic coming in.