no.stupid.answers

Check this out: Startup Schwag is a blog/subscription to receive all kinds of schwag from all kinds of start ups. Every month a new package is delivered to you, chock full of t-shirts. stickers, etc. Here’s the deal in their words:

Startup Schwag™ is a web2.0 startup schwag tshirt of the month club. It’s based on a simple, wonderful idea recently abandoned by RubyRed Labs in San Francisco: Valley Schwag. They shipped Silicon Valley schwag to subscribers every month. In April 2007, they stopped shwagging.

The April edition bag o’ schwag included Answers.com t-shirts! I’d love to know how many folks are now walking around with Answers.com: I’ve got all the answers t-shirts.

Got something to prove? Get your own t-shirt here.

Pools. Cheese. Martial arts. The curiosity never ends, folks, so neither does my job. Here is what bloggers have been learning lately:

• Watch out; the Times Herald-Record is exploring the invention of martial arts.
• Osxdude’s World is cracking down on battery-draining car chargers.
• Lipgloss & Baseball wants to know what plastic is made from.
• The Wave gets watery in the dimensions of an Olympic-sized pool.
• Just a reminder that there are many uses for cheese…
• Like the names of blogs that are getting educated about when to use apostrophes.

It’s been a bit longer than I usually wait for the WikiAnswers/Answers.com blogger round-up, so this is going to be a ginormous list.

Remember, folks: answers are everywhere - on the web, in your photo albums, between the seat cushions - you just have to keep looking till you find them.

Or, to make it easier, go to www.answers.com or http://wiki.answers.com.

And now for the list:

• Griffith Park, Interrupted is hesitant to reuse plastic bottles.
• Yarraville Paul sings the English translation for Pie Jesu.
• Emily Glauser gets the 411 on 420.
• A cat care blogger thinks about whether cats think (and therefore am?).
• Cnet is covering the topic of monopolies (let’s hope they aren’t the only ones!).
• In The Fourth Bit, good old Answers.com is listed as an excellent resource for Spanish-speakers learning English phrases.
• The Star learned something new (as am I):

In parts of Texas and Oklahoma, pinochle refers not to a card game but to the manly sport of thumb wrestling. One speculative explanation: It could be “related to the words pin and knuckle, describing the object of the game: using one’s thumb to `pin’ the other’s knuckle.”

• Bintel Blog discovers a stoush, and thankfully, the meaning of the Australian word.
• The Collegian gets a laugh with the definition of slapstick comedy.
• Nashua Telegraph is finding answers on changing the oil in a Toyota Camry.

Answers.com made it to the Top 100 Webware sites awarded the honor of being a “cool Web 2.0 app for everyone.”

On behalf of Answers.com, I’d like to thank God, the Academy and my dear mother. Without all her encouragement to “push the interwebs as far as they go, honey, and don’t forget to write me an tmail dmail email about how to use the fax machine,” I don’t think Answers.com would be the world’s greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia it is today.

We’ve all wanted it. We’ve envied them from afar. We’ve secretly plotted to steal their cute clothes and their fancy cars. Everyone wants to be a cool kid. Or was that just me?

Nah…you know you wanted to be a cool kid.

Well today…WikiAnswers is the cool kid. We’ve been chosen by the folks at Cool Site of the Day to be…well…the cool site of the day!

What does it all mean? Well it means that folks out there think we’re pretty darn cool. They’ve featured a new site every single day since 1994 and today, they chose us. Thanks for the recognition, guys!

Now all of you WikiAnswers fanatics…get out there and vote for us. (That link will only work today…April 16, 2008 so hurry up and click it!)

IT Nitwit, blogger at… well, Confessions of an IT Nitwit, discusses an online tradition of librarians from all over: Slam the Boards!

These are no ordinary librarians: They call themselves the Answer Board Librarians, participate in their own wiki and describe their project as the following:

“This is an idea-sharing wiki for librarians who post to answer boards, like Answers.com’s WikiAnswers, Yahoo Answers or Amazon’s Askville. We recognize that these sites can help promote the idea that librarians are active and dynamic participants in the web 2.0 community, and we’re not just waiting for the questions to come in!”

Anyway, IT Nitwit has come to the following conclusion, with which I couldn’t agree more:

“On the basis of a fairly brief look in Yahoo! Answers much of the material is rubbish - the questions are insincere and the answers aren’t much better. Perhaps the fact that I looked under the Environment and Health categories skewed the results. Most questions in Environment were more platforms for expressing an opinion.

WikiAnswers had a much higher standard of questions and answers.”

HealthPricer Post proves this point with a comparison done between Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers. Check out the major difference in the quality and maturity of the answers given.

Of course, there is a lot of work to be done on WikiAnswers, but after finding that the site was the fastest growing U.S. site in 2007 - well, it shouldn’t be too far along from world domination…