no.stupid.answers

On the Answers.com Widget Gallery, which you have undoubtedly visited and used at least 742512346062 times by now, you may have noticed that we used RSS to build the various widgets.

And that’s where Dapper, “The Data Mapper,” came in and swept us off our feet. Dapper “aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website.”

Essentially, you can take content from anywhere on the web and create your own RSS feeds, flash widgets, Facebook applications, and more, using Dapper’s step-by-step process.

We worked closely with the Dapper folks as we developed our own widgets, and by ‘worked closely,’ I mean bugged them with questions and showered them with compliments.

So, thanks Dapper guys, for “feeding us” our menu of Facebook apps and Blogger, Vox and HTML widgets!

Hey, it’s WikiAnswers on Facebook!

P.S.: Get a Dapper-inspired Facebook app of no.stupid.answers and read us from your profile.

Yours truly was interviewed for an article in Globes, a fancy-shmancy Israeli business finance newspaper. The article covered Facebook applications, and as you know, we’ve released quite a few in the past few months.

Unfortunately for most of us out there, it’s in Hebrew… But the gist is about why and how we made Facebook applications based on Answers.com trivia and WikiAnswers Q&A. I’ve included some of my answers to the reporter’s questions in English below (not necessarily appearing like this in the article):

I work for Answers Corp, a U.S. and Israel-based company leading the world of online answers with Answers.com, a site with over 4 million reference topics, and WikiAnswers, the leading community-driven Q&A wiki. Both sites have content that I thought was worth sharing – we all need answers, right?

We wanted to create a way to allow Facebook users to put Answers.com trivia and WikiAnswers Q&A on their profiles, allowing friends to ask and answer questions or learn new facts, updated daily. That’s where Dapper comes in. Dapper, an exciting new Web 2.0 company, makes it easy to extract content from any site and reuse it elsewhere. They recently developed a way to create Facebook apps from any website content (in beta), which is how we’ve been creating these apps. We’re working closely with them as early adopters of their technology.

I chose topics for the apps that I thought would appeal to different people with diverse interests; for instance, there’s a Music Q&A app, perfect for people who are into music trivia, a Sports Q&A app for sports enthusiasts, and so forth. What you get is an app in your profile listing unanswered trivia questions, which anyone who can view your profile is invited to click and answer on WikiAnswers.

It’s also great for students, who were Facebook’s original audience. They can add Q&A apps relating to their studies (law, health, money) and test their knowledge, help others learn or even ask questions of their own.

Aside from Q&A apps, there are also a bunch of trivia apps as well: Quote of the Day, Wine Word of the Day, Today’s Birthdays (see below for URLs). There is also another app – the first we did - developed by Dapper that includes Word of the Day and Today in History (here).