no.stupid.answers

Wow. WikiAnswers made it to the top 20 Web 2.0 sites as counted by Hitwise. And, look at that, it even placed higher than just being at #20.

This is so huge. What an honor to make it to the top Web 2.0 sites, along with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia…

What Heather Hopkins of Hitwise did was include sites that “enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” The percentages you see are market share.

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Fun fact: According to Hitwise’s numbers, WikiAnswers’ percentage growth is much higher than anybody else’s in this list; nearly 3 times higher than the next biggest jumper!

So how long do you think it is before WikiAnswers bumps out MySpace?

A 24-hour time line of questions you wish you could ask out loud…

Ever thought about how many questions you ask yourself in a typical day? “Who came up with the word ‘shampoo’?” “How do you get deodorant stains off your t-shirt?” “Do blonds still have more fun?”

Well, I decided to keep track of these pearls of wisdom I wish I had for a full 24 hours (sans the hours I’m asleep - duh). And voila! A day in the life… presented via query time line

6:45 am Who invented the alarm clock? (And whyyyy?)
7:05 am Where did the term “crapper” really come from?
7:30 am Where can you buy organic shampoo at a reasonable price?
8:30 am How many people, on average, ride the NY subway system every day?
8:40 am When is it ever acceptable to pair fuschia with pink polka dots?
9:15 am How many calories are there in a medium latte?
10:00 am How do you setup auto-archive in Entourage on a Mac?
11:15 am What are some early warning signs of carpal tunnel syndrome?
12:30 pm What’s healthier: cous-cous or brown rice?
1:30 pm Do they make treadmills you can put a laptop on?
1:45 pm How are some coffees instant and others not (instant)?
2:00 pm Can people tell when you give them limited access to your Facebook profile?
2:30 pm Why does your hip feel sore after sitting for a few hours?
2:35 pm How much is too much coffee in one day?
5:30 pm What did people do before cell phones?
6:00 pm Do they sell Long Island Railroad passes for multiple rides?
6:20 pm Why do more men fall asleep on the train than women?
7:30 pm How long does an average oven take to pre-heat?
7:45 pm How long is milk good after the sell by date?
8:45 pm When will the show “How I Met Your Mother” stop showing re-runs?
11:15 pm Is it better to let your computer hibernate or shut it off every night?

…So what’s your time line like?

Here’s an equation I’d like you to ponder:

Words + food + new day = get hungry every morning with a new food word every day

Not good at math? That’s ok, I’ll spell it out instead:

L-e-a-r-n a n-e-w f-o-o-d w-o-r-d e-v-e-r-y d-a-y.

It can all be yours with our brand new widget, Food Word of the Day, accessible from Facebook, our RSS listing and the Widget Gallery. Feed your Facebook profile, personal homepage or RSS reader with gourmet words and then show off when you cook dinner (or order in).

Get ready to get hungry!

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.

Ahem! Announcement! Attention, please!

Now you can proudly display your favorite questions and answers by topic on your blog, website, desktop, Facebook, personal homepage and more.

Generate your own Answers.com and WikiAnswers widgets to embed in your favorite platforms with the brand new Widget Gallery.

Personalize your widgets to display:

Word of the Day | Wine Word of the Day | Today in History | Technology Q&A | Environment Q&A | Health Q&A | Law Q&A | Sports Q&A | Travel Q&A… and more.

Are you a tech blogger? Display updated technology Q&A on your blog’s sidebar. Sports fans can get the latest sports questions delivered straight to their personal homepage. The nutrition-conscious can feed their Facebook with healthy-diet Q&A.

Widgets can be customized to appear on:

Blogger | Wordpress | Facebook | iGoogle | Netvibes | Yahoo | Apple Dashboard | Vista | RSS | Windows Live… and more.

See the full Widget Gallery.

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).