Thing 34 - Not Really Competition

Several of the answer sites were pretty fun. I liked Ask Metafilter and ChaCha. AllExperts and WikiAnswers required a lot of clicking in order to get to the questions. Yahoo also required a lot of clicking down into subcategories, and there are a lot of pretty useless polls (Chinese or Mexican food? Are you a morning person?) and questions that result in opinions but perhaps not answers (Should food be rationed to all in order to combat global warming?). Amazon's Askville is nice, but I didn't like that the first thing you see on a page is the sponsored ad links.

For me, if I wanted specific information, it would seem quicker and much more direct to ask a librarian (or even to do a specific Internet search). If I had extra time (HA!) and wanted to surf for anything interesting, these sites could be amusing. I'm not likely to spend much more time on them, though.

Where I do see a use for them is for some of the specific requests that the library - or at least my library - can't answer: how can I do this (insert task here) using this piece of software? or What are people's experiences with this particular restaurant or hotel in this location?