Question and Answer Site

[ijohn]

I am thinking of starting up a Question and Answer site similar to Yahoo Answers. This blog article sheds some light on competition in this space:

Who's Asking? A Roundup of Q&A Sites - ReadWriteWeb

Question and answer sites are pretty much just a forum and to succeed in any forum you need to have content and users already because no one will join or ask in a dead community. I can feed some of this but that will only take me to a certain point.

So, my question to you all is what do you think of this idea? How can I build a community or differentiate myself to succeed? Would you pursue something like this, and why or why not?

[nonrate]

I am thinking of starting up a Question and Answer site similar to Yahoo Answers. This blog article sheds some light on competition in this space:

Who's Asking? A Roundup of Q&A Sites - ReadWriteWeb

Question and answer sites are pretty much just a forum and to succeed in any forum you need to have content and users already because no one will join or ask in a dead community. I can feed some of this but that will only take me to a certain point.

So, my question to you all is what do you think of this idea? How can I build a community or differentiate myself to succeed? Would you pursue something like this, and why or why not?

If your model is better or solves existing problems compared to yahoo answers, sure, it's a pretty good idea. Yahoo answers has an advantage because I'm sure it's referenced on their website and search results. However, Google still drives 95% of the traffic to most web sites. But, you would also want to be very sharp on the SEO of the site.

Are you building the software yourself?

[ijohn]

I would use the open source symfony askeet to build it and I would modify the code to make seo improvements. What are some of the existing problems or yahoo answers issues that I should know about? Is there anything I could do to improve or differentiate myself?

[krisss]

Maybe you could do some sort of reward system which encourages users to answer questions , and like yahoo's best answer - the best answer will win points , which can then earn prizes.

This could be difficult but its just an idea.

It will be hard to compete with yahoo

[ijohn]

right, so there are small ways to make it better and cooler (prizes, points, etc) but I don't think that will help in competing with a giant like yahoo answers. I think the only way to compete is to isolate a particular audience or particular type of questions. Still trying to figure that part out.