David Weinberger's Intranet Buzz:
When Q&A Goes Global: Or, How a Tool Aimed at the Intranet Market Redefines Discourse.

By David Weinberger
Editor, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization

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The Web is enabling us, as a species, to invent new forms of discourse. This didn't use to happen all that often. Now it does. Inventing and discarding new ways of talking ... what could be cooler?

One of the new forms twists the Q&A format into something novel. Take a look at:

http://answerpoint.ask.com/0/0/0/1/communities.html

This is AnswerPoint at AskJeeves, a site powered by Quiq. (Are we that desperate for names already?) Here visitors can post any question they want, and anyone on the planet can choose to answer it. Quiq (www.quiq.com) is actually aiming at the corporate intranet market where there is some form of control over the quality of the questions and answers -- see http://askus.chipcenter.com for an example -- and the Jeeves site is really just a "proof of concept" and a way of making some marketing noise. Still, it makes for an oddly interesting site.

I spoke with Kartik Ramakrishnan, one of Quiq's founders. Here is an edited Q&A with him:

JOHO: How did Quiq come about?

KR: I was in IT for half dozen years. I'm passionate about information management. But I also went to business school. Watching the Net, I was interested in how online communities can add value to a corporation. So I formed QUIQ with my brother, Raghu Ramakrishnan, a Professor of Computer Sciences at The University of Wisconsin- Madison, who has a keen interest in Information Management as well.

JOHO: Why a question-answer format?

KR: It's a basic human instinct. When we need help, we turn around and ask questions. We wanted to make it simple for other participants to share answers.

JOHO: What's different about the Q&A format?

KR: As soon as AnswerPoint was deployed, we saw that so much of the user experience is determined by the presentation modality. And there's a temporal element of information. If a question doesn't get answered in 3 days, the chances of it getting answered decreases exponentially. It gets lost. Usability studies show that. We want to resurface the older questions.

JOHO: Are these sessions moderated?

KR: Lightly. One reason questions don't get answered is because the people who looked at it thought it was superficial or not worthy of an answer. The moderator can raise worthwhile questions again. Also, they can watch for people using excessive profanity. And, the moderator can re-categorize a question if the person asking it put it in the wrong bin.

JOHO: Good, because I noticed at the Jeeves site that the questions in the Travel->Airlines category were wildly off base. There are questions such as:

"how do i deal with my 13 year old daughter?"

"how many years is"four score and seven"."

"where can i find a coleslaw reciepe"

"Can blondes tell when lighting will strike before it does?"

KR: That's because we default to Airlines->Travel if you don't categorize your question. We're fixing that.

JOHO: Too bad. It's very amusing. Does your system notice if someone has already asked a similar question?

KR: Not at the Jeeves site, but our core product offering does. We have developed a similarity search algorithm to identify prior similar contributions.

JOHO: What has the Jeeves site taught you that you hadn't anticipated?

KR: We need to provide a way to enable people to thank answerers. Instead, people use an answer to write a thank-you. So, a question might have five answers, but two or three of them are thank-yous.

Also, we were surprised that when we launched AnswerPoint in May, a bunch of people wrote questions asking why we didn't have a search capability. We do now, but I was surprised that they used the system to critique it.

Oh, and as the system was being used initially, you'd see the same question four or five times. Interviews showed that people thought they were in a chat room, so when there was no answer, they did what you do in a chat: you ask again.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love the Web.

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The Author

David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com, a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines (including Wired) and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach him at self@evident.com.