Yahoo Answers- an open Recommendations area
I just posted a question on educational products for kids in Yahoo Answers. Pretty neat, I must say! I’m jealous of course as the one behind the Frenchparents site, because my first goal in creating this platform was to enable parents ( like me) to easily find answers to questions they had on raising and caring for their children, from birth to adolescence. This is the member-only Recommendations area of the site.
I had a particular angle as well: the aim was to offer a place to help connect those parents with an interest in the French culture.
The reason I’m jealous is Yahoo Answers provides a super easy and accessible way to attain this goal. You log in, enter your question and can get an anwer very quickly! Yahoo has a points system that encourages good behaviour, ie, quality answers.
That brings me to one of the limitations I would see to such a seductive system of Q and A:
- Who will respond to my question? Will it be someone I’m close to in terms of background and personality, and even geographically? I mean if my neighbour answered my questions on raising kids, I probably wouldn’t want her advice, because we have so little in common. If someone in the UK answered, whereas i’m in San Francisco, it wouldn’t help me too much either…
The idea behind a closed community like Frenchparents was that:
- It would first of all provide a safe place to ask all sorts of questions, even personal ones
- It would bring together those who took the effort to sign up to the site by filling out a loooong form and to pay a huuuge membership fee ( $20 to $35 a year)!
- It would bring together parents in a given geographical area, with similar references and constraints- like the excessive amount of sunshine and fresh air one gest living San Francisco…
- The other cautionary note to Yahoo Answers is the following. This is another giant mega tera database of us being held by a giant, woldwide company. From the categories we ask our questions in, Yahoo can infer our areas of interest and know yet a little more about us than where we live and our name, which they knew already. It just feels weird to me to have all this personal information held by a large corporate entity thats more powerful than any country governement…
Now with Frenchparents, members know some of the personal information they may provide is stored by a teeny, tiny entity with no power whatsoever! 
The web sure isn’t boring these days…
Let me comment on this post, with a few days hindview. This post is actually from a couple weeks ago but I transferred it from another blog. I only got one answer to my question on good Cd Roms, and it seems to be from someone who doesn’t know much about the issue because they suggested Baby Einstein CD Roms, which actually don’t exist. There’s a great baby Einstein Cd collection, but no Cd Roms.
-> http://www.babyeinstein.com/
So just goes to show for MY needs, those of a demanding mother and surfer, there’s still not much out there on the web!
↓ Quote | Posted November 6, 2006, 3:38 am