We are ready to launch YouSaidIt for Community Q&A. The easy way to bring Q&A capabilities to your community.
This is a limited beta launch so that we can continue to gather feedback and ensure good performance. You can sign up if you are interested at YouSaidIt.com.
You can see it live and in action at KUOW – Seattle’s NPR affiliate. We are very grateful for their support during the design and testing of YouSaidIt. They are great people and have a great community.
There are several sites that are in the midst of design and launch which we will be announcing soon.
It’s time to replace the forum with an alternative approach. There have been many attempts to make a better forum, but in the end, they are still forums (or fora if you prefer). They still lack the structure necessary to make for a more structred discussion that is useful for the participants, can be navigated by the readers, and finally can make some money for the hosts.
Q&A is the perfect replacement when implemented correctly. Why? Here’s the simple enumerated reasons. Let’s talk if you want to know more:
1. Participants can ask and answer questions which is typically central to most forums.
2. Commentary is included but distinguished from the Q&A content.
3. Easy to navigate, provides great SEO/Google results and searchers are brought to answers.
4. Great for all your users not just the fanatical few. No training or knowledge rquired to use it.
5. You can integrate it with the other content of your site by using your CSS.
6. It will make you money, which almost no forum does, because it’s a good advertising platform.
Everyone is starting to do it. Q&A for specific verticals is becoming de rigeur. Check out the New York Times: Q&A is now a supplement to their gadget blog. Of course it is, because it is the best way to involve your readers in something other than a free-for-all.
The NYT Q&A is an example of an advice column. You ask the expert, in this case J.D. Biersdorfer, your technical questions and he answers them. It’s just a special case of the century old agony column, such as Miss Manners or Dear Abby.
But Q&A can apply equally well the kinds of things we now use forums for. Forums are perhaps the best source of advice on the web. They are difficult to find (google doesn’t favor them), difficult to navigate (search results don’t bring you to the actual answer), and full of extraneous commentary that is hard to distinguish from the questions and the answers. The comments are fine and useful, but they have always need to be defined as commentary.
If you want the benefits of a forum without the mayhem and a better advertising platform to boot… send us an email. We’re still in limited beta but looking for interested partners.
