Learning is the key to fixing a lot of problems. I’m a pretty inquisitive guy naturally, and I love finding out about things — how they work, people’s opinions of them, and the such. Throughout my pursuit of knowledge and answers, I’ve stumbled upon some great question and answer sites to answer some of my questions and give me new ideas and exposure.
Here are ten great sites that will make for great sources to answer your burning questions:
1. Quora
Quora is a site where people post answers to your questions. It also allows you to follow Topics, People, and specific Questions, which is great for keeping up with trends and questions that you never run into yet. Its advantage lies in its community of reputable experts. I’ve found the number of questions to be quite diverse — Quora covers a wide variety of topics and interests and is bound to have something for your curiosity. You can also choose to search for answers to specific questions right in the search bar on every page. Try Quora out!
2. Yahoo! Answers
While Yahoo! Answers may sometimes vary in quality, it makes up for in quantity. Statistically, it’s quite probable that you’ll find a good answer to a question — although you may have to through a few series and threads of questions and discussions before you run into something you find credible. No disrespect meant: I’ve found many great leads and sources to answers that I’ve been able to confirm with other sources over the internet with Yahoo! Answers.
3. Stack Overflow
Interested in programming? Stack Overflow is a Q&A site dedicated to answering inquiries about programming. There are specific questions about chunks of code, or mechanisms and how they function. Users can have their questions voted up or down, and that determines how much visibility each one gets.
4. Super User
Super User is a community that collaborates and gives advice on how to help out computer enthusiasts with their questions. It is geared more towards the power user, hence you’ll find geeky questions and their more geeky answers abound on the site.
5. LinkedIn Answers
If you have any business questions or inquiries that you’d like someone with relevant experience to answer, I’d suggest visiting LinkedIn Answers. A lot of the questions don’t exactly have a 100% correct answer, so it’s great to see people’s opinions and points of view working together to critically analyze and dissect questions. This is also a great way to provide advice to others and gain their attention, while building your own reputation if you ever seek to become an expert in this field.
6. Answers.com
Answers.com is another wiki-styled source for information. You’ll be surprised at how familiar it looks — that’s because you’ve probably browsed on it when it appeared on your Google Search Results!
7. Mind the Book
Mind the book is a site that aggregates information about books. It allows you to seek people’s opinions on which books are the best resources to answer your questions. You can then see how good each suggestion is depending on the community’s votes.
8. Amazon’s Askville
Askville‘s got some great answers to some very solid, technical questions. However, there are also some more unusual questions that also have some unusual responses, which make for funny dialogue.
9. Hacker News’ Ask Section
If you are a startup founder then you probably know about Y Combinator, the famous startup funding group that is known for its unique style of approaching startup funding and for investing in great companies. Hacker News is their news and information meme and it’s ask section is a great place to get answers to questions related to business, technology, startups, and just about anything related to the web.
10. Blurtit
Blurtit is a Q&A community that allows users to ask questions and get answers from experts in the community. Moving forward the Blurtit team is working on creating an enhanced social experience for its 30,000 regular Blurtit contributors and a question-seeding technology based on Twitter feeds that helps to predict the questions that people will be asking
Started in 2006, Blurtit is a profitable privately funded business with no venture capital funding taken to date. As at August 2010 Blurtit had over 11m unique visitors a month who came to read and add to a databank of over 2.5 million answers to questions
In 2010 the company launched Qhub. Qhub allows experts and people who are passionate about a subject but have no internet programming skills, to set up and start running their own Q&A forum in less than 5 minutes. Over 4,000 Qhubs were set up in the six-month beta trial.
