On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:

Yes, it was pretty abrupt. See Jason Scott on this issue and how it wasn't even announced but buried in some obscure Yahoo documentation entry.

Google to its credit didn't bury the death notice in help, but they didn't exactly highlight it: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.ht...

Knol—We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.

That's surprisingly harsh - when I looked through past shut-downs ( http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20and%20Knol#knol-death-watch ), Google seemed to usually preserve *public* material as static files. But in this case, they seem to be saying the Knol content will be completely purged off their servers.

(Which is a good lesson that Jason Scott would also appreciate, anyway, about trusting the cloud with your content. Not that trusting your content to Wikipedia is much better, from the long-term point of view.)