There have been lots of Web based Q&A services that promise custom answers from actual humans, ranging from fee-based ones like Google Answers (that works on an auction model) to the defunct FIND/SVP’s “Ask an Expert” site, to various free services like Wondir.com and the various individual locality “ask a librarian” services, to of course your own public reference library. (As Gary Price noted here)
My preference is to call on librarians when possible for quick and free answers, but sometimes a question is not really reference or library oriented one. Perhaps the question is very offbeat, or there’s a need for advice, or a strategy, or to hear someone’s experiences and not a “look up” type answer that a librarian would provide.
I’ve been playing around a bit with Yahoo Answers for a couple of weeks now, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised with the answers I’ve received. Now my expectations were quite low, and so that didn’t hurt. But while there are countless silly and meaningless questions and answers on the site, there is a good share of people who have good information they want to share, and I’ve now been the recipient of this several times already.
From a business researcher’s standpoint, you might find an answer to a question about a company, for instance, that would not be found in a standard reference work or even on the Web. Try it out–if nothing else, it’s actually a pretty fun site to play around with.
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It’s always nice to read positive reviews about new services from experts. Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Amazon “Askville”? What about AskMeNow? I (the novice techy) am completely hooked on AskMeNow. I like the whole mobile aspect. Do you think the future of this Q&A technology lies in mobile devices?
Comment by LBoogieDown — October 19, 2006 @ 12:16 pm
Hi lboogiedown,
Thanks for the comment–to tell you the truth, both of those services are new to me…so I plan to check on them now!
Yahoo Answers has been getting a lot of publicity over the last couple of months–if you weed through the noise, I find that you can indeed get some good answers.
Comment by Robert Berkman — October 19, 2006 @ 1:18 pm