no.stupid.answers

Cool new feature to introduce today - freshly baked and right out of the WikiAnswers oven: the Community Forum. Supervisors and contributors alike have been asking for this one for a while, and for good reason.

In the Community Forum, we can post our wants, our likes, our dislikes… We can chat, share funny questions… We can put the social in social knowledge!

One little thing, though: you have to be logged in to view and participate (for now). Aw, not so bad though - all you need is a username, password and email address to sign up and then you get to join the fun!

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.“