Blogging and Quora

Quora is one of the better Question and Answer forums - I joined it last August. To get started, one can follow Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and/or topics. Anything one writes is public - so over time, answers accumulate into something that looks a lot like a blog. There's some thoughtful design keeping the pages simple in appearance, while linking back to the original questions to preserve context. There's an accumulation of reputation, too, as logged-in readers can vote up and thank for answers. So far, it's not obvious what the business model will be (and the question has been asked).

Robert Scoble, who tracks interesting technology trends and write about them, recently discovered Quora, and is enthusiastic - when Robert is enthusiastic, several thousand of his followers know all about it, and quite a number of them joined Quora too. It seems to have survived that onslaught.

Roger Ehrenberg, at IAVentures, has been writing long form answers in the Venture Capital and Startups topics - a couple of days ago he asked (on Twitter) whether he should cross post his answers from Quora to his own blog. Quora makes it easy to send a post to Twitter pointing to a new Quora answer. Adam Lasnick, who's a Google Webmaster, has a good list of pros and cons.
Like him, I conclude that the visibility, associated possibility of helping more people, and ease of use outweighs the disadvantages - like having much less visibility into who sees your writing. You note, however, that I'm writing this as a blog post on my own site - it's not a question, and some of the audience for my blog hasn't (yet) found Quora ...

Stackoverflow is a longer established Q & A site, much more tightly focused for programmers - reputations built there are an obvious target for recruiters, as Robert Scoble pointed out yesterday. Hunch is also driven by questions, and gives answers - initially it looked like a trivia game, but has become more obviously a way to recommend products by matching people's preference patterns.

All examples of crowd sourcing - building a site where the users of the site build the content and the value. Facebook are past masters at this (and Goldman Sachs agrees, given its $375m ($75m to Digital Sky) investment). We are being their digital peasants. Time to build our own castle ?

References

My page on Quora
Quora's long term business plan question
Adam Lasnick on writing on other sites
Stackoverflow for programmers
Reputations and recruiters - Robert Scoble
Hunch
Goldman invests in Facebook (Wall Street Journal blog)