human reference - various answers

I'm not sure really what to make of these answers sites.  Isn't every discussion forum basically the same thing?  What does it tell us that people keep reinventing "generic answers" sites?  Is it just part of the ongoing battle to create communities?  Need answers = need enough people answering...  In the post-USENET world, with specialized discussions scattered on thousands of sites, is it even realistic to try?

Anyway:

• Google Answers (selected experts, and you have to pay)
• Yahoo Answers (anyone can ask, anyone can answer, AFAIK)
• Wondir (any to any)

Have libraries missed an opportunity?
Could the Wikipedia community be leveraged?  (I guess Answers.com is doing that in a way.)
Do enough eyeballs make any question answerable?

It will be interesting to see how the tension between new and established, between decentralized and centralized, continue to play out.  It seems to me that many organizations that have moved to the Internet world have lost sight of their audience.  Most libraries are surely intensely local organizations.  Are they making that connection?

After having pondered these things and written my posting, I see Gary Price has lots of info from earlier in the month along similar lines: Other Q&A Services, Most Available For Free.

Comments

[Jean-Claude Bradley]

As you said, it will be interesting to see how these services sort themselves out. In any kind of evolution (biological or digital) things don't turn in expected ways. I see the research science blog as another type of Q&A system driven by RSS and guided to solve high-level problems. For example, at UsefulChem, we are currently trying to synthesize new anti-malarial compounds and I have some questions posted that very few people in the world have the knowledge to answer. But their answers could have a huge impact on the project. The challenge is to find them.

[Ben Toth]

The UK National Library for Health has a pilot online question answering service, with an RSS feed.

URL http://www.clinicalanswers.nhs.uk/