On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)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.h…
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.)
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net