Johnny Software Blog

There is a pretty neat web site I have been using since its inception a few months ago.

The site is called Yahoo Answers.

While everyone knows, if you kind of know about something, and there are some unique words used to describe it, you can find out more about it by doing of search of the whole web using Yahoo, or Google, or whatever.

The problem is, some questions are not easily or quickly solved by searching. Good reasons for this are things for which all the descriptive terms are very common words. Other things could just be very obscure or arcane subjects. Things which people with certain experience might know, but it is not something that reference books typically hold.

So, this new site from Yahoo seeks to deal with that. They have already gotten a lot of kudos from the media and bloggers out on the web. Everybody seems to be starting to notice the site.

It is useful, fun, and helpful. Everyone likes to be helped sometimes. The big shocker is that people like to be helpful too. While this really is not explained well by economics, it has been demonstrated in practice.

One possible reason for this is that each person gets a score. It is kind of a role-playing game (RPG) in that sense. As your score rises, you get promoted to different levels. With each promotion, you gain more privileges. Generally, these privileges let you ask - and answer - more questions. The more good answers you give, the more points you get!

Who decides what answers are good is the community. The other Yahoo Answers users themselves, in other words.

While not all the answers are right, or even serious, many of them are. Asking a question can usually get one unstuck. And that is the point of this site - and why it works.

Try it!

Note that if you have your own blog, they have a little snippet of HTML on the site that you can copy and paste into the template for your blog. That way some of your recent stuff on the site can appear on the sidebar of your blog. You do not have to do this. Most people do not bother. But, if you want to do it, it is just one more benefit of using the site.

Technorati Tags:
blogging, social, reference

It looked so surrealistically beautiful this morning.

Just now, only a half hour after my last glance at the sunny bliss that was outdoors, I was stunned to see a heavy rainstorm and a uniform light gray covering the previously blue, sunny sky.

Well, I will still probably go see my movie tonight. And I am glad I saw the weather at its best.

This is the prettiest day I can recall seeing in ages.

When I took the trash out before dawn this morning, there was an extremely unusual thick fog on my street. I thought, oh great, this is going to be a really yucky day.

However, the fog burned the daylight away. Now I am looking out the window at a bright sunny day.

I am pretty psyched. I got some things done last night that I wanted to get done for a long time.

Tonight, I am planning on going to see Underworld: Evolution. Been wanting to see that one for over a month. Never seemed to find the right time to do it.

I use MarsEdit a lot of the time to do Weblog posts from my Macintosh. However, until this afternoon, I have never tried to do it to this weblog.

Hope it works!

LOL, it has been so long since I posted an entry here - I forgot I even had this weblog!

Guess I will have to stop by here more often.