Google Inc. is taking the wraps off an Internet encyclopedia designed to give people a chance to show off - and profit from - their expertise on any topic.

The service, dubbed “knol” in reference to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the Internet search leader’s marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be related to the topic covered in the knol.

The advertising option could encourage people to write more entries about commercial subjects than the more academic topics covered in traditional encyclopedias.

Since Google disclosed its intention to build knol, it has been widely viewed as the company’s answer to Wikipedia, which has emerged as one of the Web’s leading reference tools by drawing upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.

But Google views knol more as a supplement to Wikipedia than a competitor, said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. Google reasons that Wikipedia’s contributors will be able to use some of the expertise shared on knol to improve Wikipedia’s existing entries.

With a seven-year head start on knol, Wikipedia already has nearly 2.5 million English-language articles and millions more in dozens of other languages.

Knol is starting out with several hundred entries. The initial topics covered include an overview of constipation by a University of San Francisco associate professor of gastroenterology and backpacking advice from one of Google’s own software engineers.

In a move that signals a possible thawing of Google Inc’s relations with Hollywood, its YouTube unit has reached a deal to feature film clips from Lions Gate Entertainment Inc on the video-sharing site.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt announced the deal at an Ad Age/William Morris Agency conference on Wednesday and said it would give viewers access to scenes from their favorite Lions Gate movies, accompanied with ads.

Lions Gate later confirmed the deal.

“There are things in our library like ‘Dirty Dancing’ that have been watched tens of millions of times and it will be nice to get paid for that and to set viewers in the direction of buying movies,” Lions Gate Vice Chairman Michael Burns said in a phone interview.

Lions Gate, also home to the popular “Saw” horror movies and Oscar winner “Crash,” would appear to be taking more of an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach towards YouTube.

This is in sharp contrast to media giant Viacom Inc, owner of Paramount and MTV Networks, which has sued Google and YouTube for $1 billion, accusing them of copyright infringement by enabling unauthorized viewing of its shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”

Have you ever wanted to know the name of admin@gmail.com? Now you can.

Through a bug in Google calendars the names of all registered Gmail accounts are now readily available. All you need to find out the names of any gmail address is a Google calendar account yourself. Depending on your view this ranges from a harmless “feature” to a rather serious privacy violation. According to some reports, spammers are already exploiting this “feature”/bug to send personalized spam messages.

The Google-Viacom showdown over the handover of YouTube user data appears to be over. The two sides agreed to changes in a previous ruling that would have required Google to hand over user id’s, IP addresses and a list of all viewed YouTube videos to Viacom in connection with their ongoing copyright infringement litigation.

After an online uprising against the order, Viacom tried to assert that they never requested personally identifiable information (they did), and later promised not to use the information to sue individuals. The value of that promise was questioned by us and many others.

The new order, filed this evening, states that Google will substitue user id’s and IP addresses for anonymous but unique identifiers.

In the latest expansion beyond its main mission of organizing the world’s information, Internet search leader Google Inc. hopes to orchestrate more fantasizing on the Web.

The Mountain View-based company unveiled a free service Tuesday in which three-dimensional software enables people to congregate in electronic rooms and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. The service, called “Lively,” represents Google’s answer to a 5-year-old site, Second Life, where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to navigate through virtual reality.

Google thinks Lively will encourage even more people to dive into alternate realities because it isn’t tethered to one Web site like Second Life, and it doesn’t cost anything to use. After installing a small packet of software, a user can enter Lively from other Web sites, like social networking sites and blogs.

The Lively application already works on Facebook, one of the Web’s hottest hangouts, and Google is working on a version suitable for an even larger online social network, News Corp.’s MySpace.

Google on Monday said that it has created an open-source project for a data interchange format called Protocol Buffers.

The software is meant to solve the problem of sharing information in a wide range of formats between servers at high speed. It’s also designed to let companies like Google upgrade software on a network of connected servers without causing hiccups.

Google thought of using XML as a lingua franca to send messages between its different servers. But XML can be complicated to work with and, more significantly, creates large files that can slow application performance.

Protocol Buffers is an alternative way of describing the format of data that is being sent over the network or stored to a hard drive. Unlike XML, it’s a compact format and is designed to be simple to use, according to Kenton Varda, from Google’s Software Engineering Team.

Varda wrote in the company’s open-source blog:

Protocol Buffers allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice. These classes come complete with heavily-optimized code to parse and serialize your message in an extremely compact format. Best of all, the classes are easy to use: each field has simple “get” and “set” methods, and once you’re ready, serializing the whole thing to - or parsing it from - a byte array or an I/O stream just takes a single method call.

Matt Cutts, a software engineering from Google’s Webspam team, said that Protocol Buffers automatically generates Java, Python, or C code.

Adobe’s announcement that Google and Yahoo! will be indexing Flash content at a much deeper level was met with all sorts of reactions last week, ranging from praise from the Flash and Flex communities to utter shock and horror from some HTML fundamentalists expressing fear that the end was nigh.

Well, it appears that Google has already started using this new indexing system and some Flash developers are not happy by how much it is revealing about their applications.

Peter Elst, a prominent Flash developer (diclaimer: and member of the Flash Pack on Pistach.io, of which I am a partner), just Twittered the following:

oh no, SWF indexing seems to do just as I feared — already noticed Google was picking up my test Flash SEO swf but its now exposing URL’s

And posted his concerns on his blog, wherein he quotes Ryan Stewart from Adobe on what exactly is getting indexed:

… it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application.

Peter goes on to state why this could be dangerous:

The concern I have here is that URL requests to the backend will get indexed, those URLs getting exposed in search queries or spider bots hitting those URLs could cause issues. Its not like in HTML content where the search engines can ignore form submit URLs, there is no such context in a HTTPService or URLRequest.

Viacom has recently obtained a court order that requires Google to hand over a complete list of every video watched by YouTube users. These logs will include the login names and IP addresses of the users.

Google are now asking Viacom if they can anonymize the logs before turning them over; Viacom hasn’t responded yet. But this privacy nightmare could have been greatly reduced if Google had anonymized the data in advance.

Google’s privacy policy states that they keep personally identifiable information for 18 months. There is no real reason to do so; Google can achieve everything they need even if they anonymize their search logs after just one month, and it’s time users told them to do so.

Google apparently decided to keep it clean, in more ways than one.

The company has made a minor change to its home page, adding a link to its copyright line that leads to its Privacy Center.

Google’s decision, noted Thursday in a corporate blog and a public policy blog, is an attempt to quell a controversy over the posting of its privacy policy.

Saul Hansell, a reporter with The New York Times, first brought the issue to light in May when he asked whether the company was violating California law by not posting a link to its privacy policy on its home page. Privacy advocates soon got involved. Google had maintained that it was doing nothing unlawful.

Internet search company Google signed an agreement with Brazilian public prosecutors on Wednesday to help combat child pornography on its social networking site Orkut, an accord that the company believes is the first of its kind internationally.

Under the agreement, Google will use filters to remove and prevent illegal content on Orkut, which has about half its users in Brazil. The company will also facilitate evidence gathering under judicial order in suspected crimes against children and teen-agers on Orkut without the need for international legal accords.

Google will also preserve for six months access logs of users being investigated for illegal conduct.

Google has released its free Google Media Server to bridge the gap between a PC and a TV. A Universal Plug and Play device is needed along with Google Desktop gadgets and search. An analyst noted that Google Media Server is aimed at technology-savvy consumers who know what UPnP is, unlike solutions from Apple, Inc. and Microsoft.

Having staked out a position on your PC and many mobile Relevant Products/Services devices, Google now has its sights on your living room. Late last week, the search giant announced the release of a free beta version of Google Media Server, a Windows application that seeks to bridge the gap between a PC and a TV.

That gap is between the explosion of TV programs, movies, music and homemade videos on the Web and television sets. A variety of solutions have been launched by Microsoft Relevant Products/Services, Apple and others, and now Google is entering that ring.

Its Media Server uses Google Desktop gadgets as the administration tool and desktop search to find media files. The user will also need a Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) device like Sony’s PlayStation 3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Hewlett-Packard’s MediaSmart high-definition televisions, and other consumer devices.

Google Maps has formed a five-year partnership with Tele Atlas, the Belgium-based mapping company that was already providing it with geographic information systems (GIS) data.

Under the new agreement–financial terms were not disclosed–Tele Atlas will provide maps and “dynamic content” for Google Maps in over 200 countries. Tele Atlas will also provide such data for other Google geographic divisions, such as Google Earth and Google Maps for Mobile, and to future Google projects that may require mapping data. Tele Atlas, in turn, will have access to annotations that Google Maps users have added to the system.