A month ago, I was talking to a good friend discussing potential ideas for making a social site. There are many bloggers that want more traffic and many internet searchers that want particular information. You put these two together and it makes sense having a social site for searchers, to put article demands for bloggers. The topics could be put on vote by all users. Bloggers see the demand for articles and depending on their expertise choose to write articles linking them to the topic. Everybody wins, what a brilliant idea.
The problem is that it exists already (although not exactly in the way we thought about) as a service by yahoo answers. I registered myself to get a feel for their implementation and their users. I started looking at areas that I know best, -greek cooking is one of them- and before I knew it I got hooked.
Not only hooked on answering questions but also on finding people in areas I’m not well versed and following their answers. Following people that have given exceptionaly good answers works well. They tend to have related bookmarks on other social sites like delicious and digg, and are polite enough to email me back if I ask them something.
10 days on yahoo answers and I’ve answered 63 questions, got on the 3rd level, and acquired 1102 points. What do the points do? They allow you to ask more questions. I dont have much to ask though. Most of my questions tend to be answered quicky googling them. In addition, most questions I can think to ask, have been asked already in yahoo answers. So my points are pretty useless.
10 days and i have already found amazing information on many fields.
Yahoo answers gives to its users a javascript snippet to put on their website. So here is mine. If you follow it, you can see all my questions and answers.
