Entrepreneurship
Community-based answer tools
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Yahoo’s almost-new Answers system (answers.yahoo.com). This got me thinking that any system that had a ratings system like Amazon’s (or any of these community-based answer systems) with a clever algorithm for sifting the good ones to the top (digg.com’s approach to news comes to mind) would be awesome.
Awesome, in this context means:
+ an acquisition target for one of the net juggernauts (msn/yahoo/google, or secondarily, InterActive, AOL/TW, or even News/myspace)
+ pretty easy to build — the value is in building the community, which means building 20 niche sites all loosely linked together would probably be the way to go
+ produce immediate income through contextual advertising.
Note that this isn’t an old idea — expertsexchange.com did this for the IT niche years ago. The site is overloaded with ads (I abhor those in-line link ads… yuck!), but is extremely useful. It’s not really community driven, however — there are moderators. Seems like Yahoo’s approach, with a point system that rewards a question-creator for choosing the best answer, is a better bet for organic hockey-stick growth. Of course, this also means that there’s a lot of bogus answers in there, as Bambi’s NetSense blog pointed out recently.
There’s also google’s approach, which calls for a team of web searchers that answer questions that people pay for. Not too shabby, if you can get it.
So here’s my spin on this idea (god, why do I have a day job?):
Setup an answers system that is completely community driven. This means self-moderation on EVERYTHING — new category creation, right/wrong answers, popularity, everything. Heck, it means creating a meta-engine for the things that are self-moderated. Users should be able to create or remove, democratically, a new parameter to be moderated.
Then share revenue with the power users. That’s the beauty of google answers (and I don’t know why they never did this… sheesh, talk about low hanging fruit) — you know the fellow answering your question is semi-intelligent at least because google has endorsed him/her. So, in this case, your “points” (a nod at the expertsexchange and yahoo systems) should be exchangeable for real money. That money would come from the ad revenue generated by the content the answerer themselves created.
I think there would be a lot of crap content at first — one of the problems with this type of system is that the smartest people don’t have time to sit around answering questions — but ultimately, the best content would sift through to the top. Or simply the most popular. Either way, there would be ad dollars — a lot of them — to support the revenue-sharing scheme.
You could actually end up generating a whole community of nerdy myspacers (those of you that have read the thirty-odd hard copy volumes of the Brittanica) that end up making a pretty good living answering questions in their underwear. And answering questions from your wireless laptop is a whole lot easier to manage than shipping out designer look-alikes sold on ebay. 
(Sheesh. Why does this always come back to underwear?)
Anyway. Once that content is out there, innovations in how to organize it — oooh, relational tagging galore — would be extremely profitable. And ultimately, the value of the idea/company/ad revenue would be based directly on the richness of the meta data multiplied by the number of sticky users.
Discussion
2 comments for “Community-based answer tools”
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There’s a risk in rewarding unscreened commenters based on ad revenue sharing.
The biggest rewards would go to those who give popular answers (correct or not) to high-traffic questions (celebrities etc). And the content and style of the whole website will shift in that direction.
That’s probably OK if ad revenue is the be-all and end-all, but I think Google Answers is aiming a little higher than that.
Responding to Mr. Browne:
I think the wisdom of the community would sift quality to the top. Controversial or subjective questions, like “Was Jesus a real guy?” or “Should we be worried about global warming?” will certainly be questionable — but in that case, ad revenue IS the be-all and end-all. Or, at least, it should be from the perspective of the engine builder/sponser/shareholder. Hoping for some sort of philosophical peace to come out of the discussion might be the point for the purpose-seeking part of my psyche, but I haven’t seen many photographs of philosophers in anything but Apple ads lately (and even that was a couple of years back).
I think the wisdom of the community, with some modest prodding, yields near-perfect results on fact-based answers. Witness the accuracy of Wikipedia. It’s absolutely shocking how well-articulated that resource is — as long as you stay away from controversial topics.