The City Attorney Debate is on at The Stranger!

This is a unique forum for the people of Seattle and the candidates because, as The Stranger put it: “It’s an opportunity for the community to ask questions directly of the candidates without those pesky reporters getting in the middle”. You ask, they answer.

The questions are closed for now and the candidates are doing the answering. You can still comment on the answers and be your own truth meter. Also if you missed asking questions for this one, there are 7 more on the way over the next few weeks, including the Mayors. Go ahead ask them what you really want answered.

We’ll continue to refine the experience for everyone, so if you found anything confusing or ways it might be better just let us know at talk2us@yousaidit.com, or on our Q&A page.

Yahoo Builds a “Walmart” in Your “Neighborhood”

Mark  Briggs (@markbriggs) sent me a post from PaidContent today about Yahoo Answers rolling out “Neighborhoods” – basically their Q&A service broken into neighborhoods. Yahoo Answers is a phenomenally successful site from a traffic standpoint being one of the most popular on the web.

But as I’ve said before, national Q&A is of limited value since people want local answers from local people – and I assume the” neighborhood” makes advertising opportunities all the better. After all people are in a neighborhoods asking questions – what better audience could you have?

I still think Yahoo is falling short of the mark because they are not representing actual communities. Communities convene around existing websites where they get their local news or shop or follow their hobbies or do their work. The Q&A should be based around that community. It’s not just locale that matters, it’s common interests and common values.

They also fall short because they continue to try and take people away from their local sites. They are essentially building a Walmart in your neighborhood. It made sense with something like Craigslist or Job Listings because fragmentation of this information was detrimental. You want to know all the jobs in your areas, not just those at a given site. But when it comes to Q&A the closer you get to the people in your community the better the answers. Consolidating them just adds noise. It’s not just WHAT someone says, it’s WHO is saying it.

Q&A should be on local shops. They are the local grocery store and hobby shop where you meet people and ask them what they think. They are the hobby conventions and the work groups you see at conferences.

How a small local bookstore took on Amazon in Google… and won.

Ravenna Third Place Books is an independent bookstore in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle. It is the model for a non-big-chain bookstore. The place is comfortable, clean (no cats), has a large and great selection of books, exceptional expertise and there is a great casual restaurant in the back (Vios) that is child friendly.

But in a world where discovery has moved online, how would you even know it? They decided to take a more interactive online presence motivated simply by extending their service to the Seattle community online. They didn’t launch a new web site or optimize everything for keywords, etc. They just put up a Q&A for their audience so they could extend their unique expertise and allow the audience to contribute with theirs.

After just “launching” and getting the first Q&A contributions, I decided to see how they would do in a Google search. I had been curious about getting a book set in Seattle and had already asked the question and gotten (as usual) great answers. So I just did that search (note: I did NOT try and game it by asking exactly the same question in Google that I did on the site as you can see from the search box and results list).

They ranked first. Amazing really. Click on it and try it yourself.