no.stupid.answers

Well, social webbies, you’ve got the Facebook, you’ve got the Twitter, the Yahoo! and Google accounts to play around with. And now you’re about to spend more time online with those IDs. Answers.com announced its new social media angle today at CES in Las Vegas:

Answers.com Connects with Social Media

Users will now have the option to log in to Answers.com with their preferred Web identities. Experts will also be able to identify themselves with their real names, more conveniently building their online reputations.

“We see a big advantage in allowing our contributors to use their existing Web identities on our site,” said Bob Rosenschein, CEO. “This change is expected to simplify login, reduce time to contribution, and increase the quality of our answers, as more people visit our site and build their online reputations. We added support for Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! accounts today and will be adding support for Google accounts in the near future.”

In short, you can create a new Answers.com account using your existing Facebook, Twitter or Yahoo! account. What’s the advantage? As mentioned, it’s a great way to build on your already existent social web ID and if you connect through Facebook, it adds the real-life human element to your answers and bolsters your online reputation.

If you happen to be at CES, visit the Answers.com booth at ShowStoppers Media Event tonight.

Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard it all: social media, social networks… but have we been paying attention to social knowledge?

Robert Formentin, VP of Advertising for WikiAnswers, presents a column on Online Media Daily about the “socialization of knowledge.” Have a read:

The Socialization Of Knowledge: An Opportunity For Brand Marketers

Formentin defines the big two: social media and social networking, and then moves on to define an area not often discussed, which is social knowledge (see? no link to Answers.com for that one).

As Formentin points out:

“Whereas Social Media is amorphous (the basic “unit” is simply whatever I choose to write) and Social Networking is egocentric (the “unit” is, well, me), Social Knowledge is informative (the “unit” is an article or an answer). It’s a framework where anyone – not exclusively experts- can educate other people by sharing what they know.” (source)

Ok, I can dig. And WikiAnswers fits right in there with its wiki Q&A model: education by and for the masses. Or, to paraphrase from Abe:

“…And those answers of the people, by the people, for the people.“