Question and answer websites are becoming quite popular these days. A good example of this is Trulia Voices, a real estate tool where you can ask real estate related questions and get answers from professionals. Google is attempting to this on a much large level with it’s “Google Knol” application which is set to come out sometime soon. Although Google Knol is probably going to be a bit more like Wikipedia the overall concept is similar. On Trulia Voices, you can for example ask a specific question about real estate in Boise, Idaho and get an answer to your question from somebody who actually knows what they are talking about. A great combination of About.com and Social Networking!
You will start seeing more and more of these Question & Answer Applications coming out, especially in niche industries like Real Estate to help provide gateways for people to have their questions answered. Here are few ideas of ones that I thought of:
- Dental Answers - People can ask dental specific questions like ‘how often should I brush my teeth’ to ‘how do I know if I have gum disease’ and so on.
- Stock Answers - stock investors can ask questions to stock professionals about what to and not to invest in. Could be extremely beneficial to the smaller investor.
- Law Answers - average joe’s like myself can have a place to ask law professionals specific questions pertaining to law and actually get some answers for once. This usually costs people money to get answers from Lawyers.
- Political Answers - voters can ask different candidate parties specific political questions and have those answered by representatives within the party. Interesting…
These are just a few. There are thousands of more that I cannot think of but someone smarter than I will. In any case, how do you build a good question and answer system for something like these? One word, WikyBlog!
WikyBlog
WikyBlog is an open source software geared toward combining blog and wiki into one. A very interesting tool that many people are having a hard time finding out how it can be put to use. A Question and Answer system is perfect for it. You are getting the wiki functionality, which is basically a large content management system providing the ease of the creation and editing of pages. Combine that with blog functionality. You are getting a Wiki with RSS capabilities, threaded comments, posts in reverse chronological order and so forth. Not to mention that MediaWiki is extremely difficult to customize on the theme side where Wikyblog is much easier.
Conclusion
Use WikyBlog open source platform for building a Question and Answer web application. Also, consider strongly the possibility of being the first to build a Question and Answer web app in your specific industry. It could pay you huge dividends.
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February 25th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
I couldn’t agree with you more. And you provide some great examples for the use of a Q&A system.
WikyBlog looks interesting and I’d like to take a deeper look at that.
I’d also like to mention that my company, Lumin Creative, actually has developed a Q&A engine that we customize and integrate with websites looking to add a Question and Answer section to their site. Edmunds (answers.edmunds.com) and Debthelp (answers.debthelp.com) are two good examples of this.
I think the main difference from WikyBlog is that our system is more like Yahoo Answers / Experts Exchange in that it uses a point system to motivate quick answers, participation in general and enable experts to be recognized for their expertise.
I’d be happy to know your thoughts about our application if you have the time to take a look.
Kind regards,
David Givoni
June 16th, 2008 at 5:39 am
Hello… I am looking to build a website where people can ask me questions and only I can provide answers. I do not want the site to
invite or allow other folks to answer the questions… only ask them. Do you have a way to do that? D
June 19th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Not too sound too simple or boring, but a “Blog” is perfect for what you are talking about. Think about it. What you are talking about is just what you are doing on my blog here. I am the main admin/writer for this blog, and all questions go to me. Only I can really answer those question. Other comments sometimes answer comments as well. Does that answer your question? I think it all depends on how you design and construct your blog together. You can definitely pull that off and make it look and function very nice.