For the past day, I’ve been trying out Quora, a social Q&A service, to see what it’s like to answer questions, pose questions, and vote on other people’s answers. There are a few other librarians already there on the service. I hope to write a longer post soon on social Q&A services and how they might work for library reference services. In the meanwhile, here are some links to the world of Q&A services:
- Quora
- My profile page on Quora (you can see what questions I’ve posed and what ones I’ve answered)
- Ask MetaFilter
- Yahoo! Answers
- Slam the Boards!
- Radford, Marie L. “‘‘Predatory Reference’ an Interview with Bill Pardue about ‘Slam the Boards.’ Second Slam Coming Up on October 10, 2007!” Library Garden, 7 October 2007. Web.
From what I’ve seen so far, I think Quora will be the next big thing in terms of social answer services. I can already think of some things they might do to expand and provide a great service; it will be interesting to see where they go with it.