Jan 25, 2011 - OWStarr's Posterous. Great Design and User Experience Is the Best Marketing - Advertising Age - DigitalNext. Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years? I’ve now been blogging for 10 years.
Looking back we haven’t seen all that much innovation for bloggers. You have a box. You type in it. Put an image into it. And hit publish. But now comes Quora. I’m really loving it. VC Shervin Pishevar says “I believe @Quora is the future of blogging.” Wow. So what’s going on there? First, look at the Quora items I’ve been participating in. So, what is the innovation here? First, it learned from Twitter. Second, they learned from Facebook. Third, they learned from the best social networks.
Fourth, they learned from blogs about how to do great SEO. Fifth, they learned from FriendFeed, Digg, and other systems that let you vote up things. Sixth, they brought the live “engagement display” that Google Wave had: it shows who is answering a question WHILE they are answering it. Seventh, it has a great search engine for you to find things you are interested in. I notice that the same thing has me very excited about Instagram, too. Why I was wrong about Quora as a blogging service … I must apologize to Dave Winer.
He warned me about supporting services that aren’t the open web and I wasn’t willing to listen to him a month ago, because I was infatuated with a cool new service that lots of insiders were supporting. I’ve seen a LOT of discussion about Quora in the past few weeks since I wrote it could be the biggest blogging innovation in the past decade. GigaOm even wrote a post asking whether it was worth the more than $80 million the investors are hoping it’s worth.
Turns out I was totally wrong. It’s a horrid service for blogging, where you want to put some personality into answers. Even worse, I’m getting dozens of emails from people pissed that their questions have been changed, their answers marked “not helpful,” or that they got kicked off the service altogether. These are all things that are allowed on blogs, even welcomed, and no one can downvote my blogs here. Why? So, does this matter to the long term relevance of the system? UPDATE: How would I fix this? The mistakes I made in Quora. So, I woke up early in Davos, Switzerland, excited to go skiing, and look at Techmeme and see that the Quora Review has published a post which could be titled “Scoble stay off the Quora lawn.”
Ouch. Then I look at email. In my email I’ve been sent evidence by some of the 53 reviewers that a small group of reviewers has been marking posts of mine as “not helpful” in retribution to some things they don’t like about my behavior there. Ouch 2. Then I see Mike Arrington has posted that Quora is not about my hopes and dreams. Ouch 3. I should have just gone skiing without looking at my computer, but now I thought I’d recount some of the mistakes that pissed off these people. Why? So you can avoid making the same mistakes and getting the ire (and collapsing button) of them aimed at you. Sorry, Scoble, Quora is not your playground « The Quora Review.
By: Dan Kaplan “This used to be my playground.
This used to be my childhood dream. This used be the place I ran to…whenever I was in need.” -Madonna So Robert Scoble, it seems you don’t like the heat. But, my, how quickly things can change. This morning, after seeing some of your favored Quora answers down-voted into oblivion and experiencing the anonymous sting of an overzealous reviewer, you decided to lash out. Well, sorry, Scoble, Quora is not your playground. You see, back in the way-back days for Quora, around the time you wrote the site off as just another “damn thing on the internet,” the community/reviewer/admin nexus was quite good at ensuring that the highest quality answers were the ones at the top.
This is not really your fault: Quora’s auto-follow logic was not built for edge cases like yours – cases that have 125K+ followers attached to their social graphs. Well, Robert, no civilization likes to be raided by Mongols. Nearly Every Single Topic On Quora Now Has A Twitter Account. Early last month, we noted that Quora was doing something rather interesting.
They were using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to mass-create Twitter accounts. That may sound shady, but it really isn’t. They’re doing it as an alternative to RSS feeds. And Twitter is totally cool with it. Those feeds are now live and ready to roll.