Question and Answer Sites - Are they any good?
User-generated content and question & answer sites hit the Internet mainstream in 2006, and are already moving to the lowest denominator. The questions are for the most part useless, and the answers are even worse. Then again you ask a dumb question, and your going to get a dumb reply. What can be expected? I mean you open a free for all, and this is what you expect. Look at what’s on TV and the radio, should we expect the Internet to be any better? I think so.
There are now six Q&A sites out there, that if moderated and monitored to a higher specification could be very useful and help everyone involved.
AskVille - Recently released by Amazon, this Q&A site is still relatively clean and offers a nice interface. It has a cloud to show the most popular topics, and has people who are still wanting to provide relevant answers and ask quality questions. Four out of five stars.
AnswerBag - Contains a lot of juvenile questions and repsonses. The average age looks about 12, but you do get to determine how many points are awarded when someone answers your questions. Woo-hoo! Two out of five stars.
Yedda - People sharing knowledge is their tagline. I think people sharing is about ten. I was on several times today, and the same questions were coming up. Someone asked about Google Ice Cream, really? Two out of five stars.
Wondir - Has a non Web 2.0 interface, and is hard to see the scrolling answers. It seems a lot of the questions involve parenting and other related topics. It is kind of clunky, and not as cool as the others. Then again a cool interface doesn’t mean quality. Kind of old school… Three out of five stars.
Yahoo! Answers - Is the best one of the group. They have messed up on a lot of social type Web sites over the past year, but Answers is great. It is easy to use, and the questions and responses are still really good quality. There of course is still junk, but the quality rises above the people looking for attention. Yahoo! even indexes the good answers in its search results. It must be good Oprah was answering questions a couple of weeks ago. Five out of five stars.
Live QnA - Microsoft is trying to keep up in the social Web, but just can’t seem to get past its clunky desktop office software. The design is flashy, but the quality and ease of use is not at the same level of Yahoo!. Three out of five stars.
Google bailed earlier this year, so Yahoo!, in my opinion, is the winner of this category. The others of course can improve on what they have, but it will take a lot of imagination, since most of them do not have the cash to buy their way to the top.
Ultimately if you are looking for quality answers, the people on Yahoo! have what you need.
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