Ask and Ye Shall Receive: What’s So Good About Quora?

My daughter is five. I suspect like many five year olds she loves to ask questions. These can range from the deepest of theological discussions to questioning the point of brussel sprouts, just before trying to force-feed one to the cat. I guess the point is that your average child’s mind is hugely inquisitive, it’s how we learn.

I think it’s fair to say that as we get older, sometimes wiser and possibly respected in our various fields we definitely ask fewer questions. Just listening to myself on the phone this morning, the questions I ask tend to be passive “Will we hit the deadline?”, or “You want to do what!?”. This is usually followed by a sharp intake of breath.

However, a new social Q&A site has got me acting like a five year old again. Quora.com, at first glance looks no different to any other Q&A set up. However, unlike its traditional counterparts, Quora seems to have captured the imagination of thousands of users in almost no time at all. The secret it seems is its social layers. Quora makes it easy to answer, but more importantly easy to pose questions to a massive audience.

To give you an example I’ll use my own experience of the site to demonstrate its potential. I have been quite keen for a while now to start my own ecommerce podcast. After all I work for Actinic and have access to a heap of information and people that others may find interesting. The barrier to my podcasting debut has been the knowledge of how to do it, what’s the best equipment, etc. I have often searched for information, but like everything you have to sift through a fair amount of dross to find a diamond. Asking the simple question “What are the best podcasting tools” (http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-podcasting-tools) on Quora has returned numerous well-informed answers as well as a number of offers to assist with my entry into the broadcasting world!

Now it would be easy to accuse Quora of simply jumping on the Q&A bandwagon, after all Yahoo, LinkedIn, Mahalo and many others have been in this game for many years. The core difference for me is the level of collaboration the site allows. If I post a question and someone wants to refine it then they can. Also anyone can suggest edits to be made for specific answers or if you like they can suggest a person to answer it. It’s the most social of all the Q&A sites and by encouraging its users to refine and perfect things, it’s building a massive user and knowledge base.

For those that know me, I am sure you will find this preposterous, but I was recently accused of being a “know it all” at a family get together. The good news is with sites like Quora, if I don’t know an answer I can easily get access to someone that does.

My advice for an interesting hour or two? Give it a go!