On Wondir

Recently Boing Boing reported on the launch of a new service, operating in competition with Google Answers. It's called Wondir, and differs most importantly in that it is a free service, and questions can be answered by anyone.

So how does it compare with Google Answers? The google variant asks for a price upfront: if you want a question answering then you have to pay for it. The beauty of this sweeps both ways: the person answering the question is rewarded for their efforts, and the person asking the question makes for damn sure it can't be answered with a two-second search on Wikipedia.

I haven't spent much time on google's site, but I'm keen to; soon I'll have a lot more free time and I want to put it to some good use. I don't what the vetting process is for becoming a researcher; I get the feeling from the "over 500 carefully screened researchers" statement on the front page that it's fairly stringent. I've signed up with Wondir already, and answered some questions, but a lot of them are phrased so badly as to be wholly unintelligible, and others are a plain waste of time.

However, the good questions are the kind you won't see on google. They're generally more personal, or personable, questions, such as this one on Donnie Darko. Answering this question is a totally different experience to researching a question on a specialist or niche topic. These questions are one of wondir's redeeming features; the other is the tip jar.

Like the answer you've been given? As a way of saying thank you, you can give the respondent a cash tip, or just provide some peer-review feedback, similar to Amazon's reviewer ratings. I doubt anyone is going to get money out of the site (but that may change as it grows) but I like the feeling I get when I see that my peer rating has improved (these are the green stars that show how well received your responses are; the gold ones show how many posts you've made, relative to the peer group in general).

Wondir has a lot of work to do if it wants to seriously compete with the likes of Google Answers. Sure, it's a free service, but to survive it will need to attract a lot of repeat custom. I would suggest that in time the number of inane questions will diminish, since these are posted by people who have been led to the site by some link or other and decided to have a laugh by asking "Does Jeeves like men?" Getting people to come back is enormously difficult (attracting them in the first place is only slightly easier, of course), but by instilling a sense of community it has a good chance, and I don't mind putting the hours in until the site either matures or dies.

Oh, and the name: Wondir. Reminds me of the Oneders from "That Thing You Do." Hardly the finest name...