Robert Scoble has a post on his blog talking about answer-finding service Quora, and why he feels it is significant. He points to a tweet from venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar who believes that it is “the future of blogging.”
Blogs may not be e-books, but they are on-line content and certainly that’s a form of TeleReading. I had never heard of Quora before today and was curious, so I went over to check it out.
What I found was an answer-finding service, where you post your question and other users will answer it. I wasn’t sure how this was different from Mahalo and Vark, answer-finding services I had used already, So I searched Quora and found some answers people had already given.
The problem with Mahalo is that its answers tend to be low quality, and it tends to attract random people who are interested in making money rather than experts. Vark (acquired by Google) uses social networks but isn’t actually social: each person answers individually, without being able to see answers from any of the other people (and possibly be reminded of or catch something that they missed). And though you can share answers or discussion threads, you can’t browse answers others have already given.
But I still couldn’t see what this has to do with blogging. After all, a blog is when you periodically write about a topic of interest to you or others, whereas question services are more about getting or giving answers. Blogging—at least the sort of blogging I do—tends to be more structured. What was Scoble on about? So I went back to his post and read it through again, considering.
Scoble’s point seems to be that Quora combines the best features of answer services with the best features of social networking, blogging, and wikis—and that it’s a lot of fun.
Anyway, I find that there’s something addictive about participating over there instead of here on my blog. Why? Because when you see people voting up your answers or adding their own replies in real time it makes you realize there’s a good group of people reading your stuff. I don’t get that immediate rush here (here I have to wait for comments to show up, which isn’t nearly as immediate).
But even he points out that “Blogging has a business model for publishers that Quora does not provide yet.” Really, the whole thing seems very poorly defined. Question-answering services combined with social networking may be the newest Internet fad, but I still don’t see what Quora has to do with blogging qua blogging.
But leaving aside the difference between blogging and question-answering, Quora could be a very useful on-line knowledge resource even if it doesn’t have anything to do with blogging. It seems to be trying to attract experts, providing higher-quality answers and also making the discussion more social, so it could turn out to be a very good place to find information, and to connect with specific experts to ask them further questions.
In a way, this is the same kind of thing that I get paid to do at work all day—using my expertise and research skills to answer questions for people—only in a broader sense and using the Internet rather than the telephone. It looks like it could be fun to play around with, at least, and more helpful to the general public than the money-minded Mahalo or single-purpose ask-and-answer Vark. I think I’ll hang around the e-book and e-book reader categories for a while.
