It should also be mentioned that Amazon has already had a site where you could ask questions for a price for some time now: Amazon Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome).
While the intent was more for completing tasks that are easier for humans than for programs, you can see that many of the tasks on the site involve just answering questions. The submitter sets a price and then they get to approve an answer before allowing payment to the answerer. |
So Will Google ever release a community powered Answers service ? |
They quietly shut down http://answers.google.com during the last years... but who knows... |
What do you mean, Philipp? Was it shut down temporarily? |
No, but more and more ways to find it were closed down. Like a link on the More page. Or that it seems to have been removed as a tip from queries with 0 results. (Nevermind that it never made the homepage!) I don't really know how new users are able to find Google Answers at this point... |
As I've pointed out several times libraries around the world (many on a nationwide level) offer 24x7x365 Q&A services. Sometimes you don't even need a library card.
For example, national services in the UK and Australia. Elsewhere on the regional or state level.
Not only can a pro researcher help you but they can also often point you to databases you might have access to for free from your library.
See:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Finding_Answers_Beyond_Web_Search/1118246650
and
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/09/05/virtual-reference-for-non-librarians/
For example, via a library service I learned that I have free full text, full image access to every article published in the NY Times from my home. Saves me a few $$$ each time I would buy one from NY Times.com or Google News Archive.
Remember what News.com said a couple of weeks ago:
http://news.com.com/Most+reliable+search+tool+could+be+your+librarian/2100-1032_3-6120778.html |
I'm glad to see Amazon taking a stab at Q&A, joining existing services like Yahoo Answers, Microsoft QnA and Yedda.
As a late comer to the game, it's clear that Amazon have observed and implemented lessons from the earlier player attempts (though I feel that their reward system still suffers from some of the basic flows inherent in other reward systems – e.g., rewarding users for more "activity" as opposed to activity that provides value to the community). It seems well designed and slick.
Amazon has also added automatic tag suggestion, in a manner similar to the method pioneered by Yedda several months ago. Still missing from Askville is an active question distribution system, like the one in Yedda, which increases the number and quality of answers for each question.
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> pioneered by Yedda several months ago
Not sure who pioneered this, something similar has been in Cafepress.com ever since I joined around a year ago (IIRC). You add a product and tag it, and the system will grab related tags via AJAX and allow them to be added to. But I like how Askville just takes your title first, and then creates a tag cloud from it seemingly out of nowhere... |
