Legal Research

5 Questions To Ask Before Jumping Into Quora

By admin

This is a good column on Quora, a service that’s getting more than its share of buzz.

Let’s Get Social: 5 Questions To Ask Before Jumping Into Quora

Read the post to see the commentary on these questions:

1. How is Quora different from other Q&A services?
2. Why is Quora attracting so much attention?
3. Is Quora likely to become a mainstream product?
4. Should I be considering investing time and/or resource in Quora?
5. Is Robert Scoble killing Quora?

I do worry about three things:

1. Quora represents itself as a question and answer service. So do libraries and librarians. Quora has so far been far more successful than previous attempts as answer-based services like Ask or Yahoo Answers. Is it a competitor or an opportunity for libraries.

2. Quora has already moved to a $100 million valuation. What is that based on? Is it ads? Is it something else?

3. Personally, I wonder if Quora has found a way to build a content farm without paying freelancers. They can conceivably use the ‘answers’ to drive content to sites using seed questions.

Quora Review: Too Confusing To Survive?

The real challenge might be to build reputation systems for question answerers. Can librarians build a reputation there? We already have a strong brand. I think it’s probably not worth it when there are more important priorities in their employers.

However, could librarians collaborate on this scale. Can Stumpers go big and mainstream?

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on February 01, 2011 (boomark / email).