Q&A, Blogging and Wondir

Allen Searls writes “My name is Allen Searls, VP of Community at Wondir.org (also Wondir.com), which has recently grown into the leading free Q&A site on the web, although weâ€™re still really in our infancy.

Although we get thousands of questions on all topics every day at Wondir.com, we really want to improve the quality of answers provided. Given their academic and reference experience, would like to invite librarians, especially library bloggers, to jump in, answer questions and test their knowledge. Weâ€™re perfectly fine with librarians promoting their blogs in their answers as well.

I hope youâ€™ll consider checking out Wondir, registering (although itâ€™s optional) answering a few questions and blogging about it. It would be great to hear your thoughts.

Allen

Allen Searls
VP Community
Wondir Inc.
www.Wondir.com

Wondir Land Weblog: http://wondir.blogspot.com“

August 28, 2004 by rochelle Uncategorized 5

nbruce says:

August 28, 2004 at 2:25 pm

Librarians answering
Of course, there would be no bias!

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GregS* says:

August 28, 2004 at 8:59 pm

classy
I just went to the site out of curiosity and under the list of questions was “should I ask a guy out or wait for him to ask me out?”. Response? Some anon posted “No undo his pants and suck his *****”

1. There’s plenty of relationship sites out there to answer that kind of question.
2. There’s a reason why a person’s private inquires are best handled in private. A Library is very much a personal experience.

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rochelle says:

August 28, 2004 at 9:02 pm

Not sure I get it
What does Wondir get out of this service? And who is their audience. I hesitated to post the submission, but hoped that someone could offer a little background or insight.

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teaperson says:

August 31, 2004 at 4:55 am

Lowered Expectations
A little Googling reveals that Wondir has distinctly scaled down its scope. Here’s what Search Engine Watch was saying about the project in 2002: “Wondir is a new and different kind of information service that seeks to unify cutting edge search technology with the web’s original egalitarian vision of people freely helping people….

Combining meta search of the open web with deep search of the Invisible web is ambitious enough in itself. Wondir is going beyond that, attempting to organize both individual volunteer experts and the hundreds of online “AskA” virtual reference services provided by libraries around the world under a single umbrella, to provide human assistance when search fails to satisfy a user’s information need.

“

Now it appears to be a site where teens ask random questions for homework help.

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Allen Searls says:

October 14, 2004 at 2:01 am

Re:Not sure I get it
Wondir monitizes its pages with Google AdSense at the moment, so we’re a for-profit company working under the online advertising model. But our roots are in the non-profit sector, where we began, and our vision has remained the same: create a site that is as easy to use as a search engine, which connects anyone with a question to anyone with an answer in real-time (or as close to real-time as possible.) Our audience is anyone/everyone who has questions or answers.

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