no.stupid.answers

Haven’t had enough of the holidays yet?

January 4th is National Trivia Day! The origins of the day are unknown, however, many would claim it is a marketing ploy of the makers of Trivial Pursuit. There is a tradition to play the famous game, or other knowledge-based games, in honor of today.

Of course, there is also a tradition to call or email friends and family and share a little-known fact… What if I propose sharing that little-known trivia fact on WikiAnswers, spreading your knowledge to an entire Q&A community spanning the globe?

Go for it! Find an unanswered question that can be answered with a piece of trivia, or create your own question and answer it. Comment on this blog post with the URL of your question and answer so we can all learn something trivial - but interesting! - today.

…Or, if you’re looking for trivia instead of sharing it, check out the Spotlight on today’s Answers.com homepage.

Let’s talk about Today’s Highlights.

It’s a daily updated feature from Answers.com that offers a spotlight, featured question, today’s birthdays, today in history and more, right from the homepage. You could say it’s like taking your daily dose of Vitamin T: ‘t’ for trivia and ‘vitamin’ because it’s good for you.

You could also take the trivia you learn and finally have something to contribute to the water cooler conversations going on right outside your cubicle. Don’t be shy; just lean over there and sing ‘happy birthday’ to Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker and Aretha Franklin or mention that today, in 1328, Robert the Bruce became king of the not-yet-independent Scotland.

Now let’s talk specifically about today’s highlight.

First of all, I wrote the Spotlight, so I can’t see a reason why you wouldn’t fall madly in love with it right when you start reading.

Secondly, it covers the topic of wikis, which we discuss here a lot (being WikiAnswers gurus and all). I’ll be honest, when I first toyed around with the whole wiki thing, I was confused and a little skeptical; after all, why should I write something if it can be edited by anyone later on?

But once I got into it, it made a lot of sense. I know a little bit about a topic, Timmy knows a little something more, Samantha adds some personal experience… Collaboration is for the greater good, and like the Spider-man movies have taught me, the greater good is worth fighting for.

Thank you Answers.com Editorial Team, for serving fresh Today’s Highlights every single day; thank you Ward Cunningham, for developing wiki technology; thank you WikiAnswers, for having the courage to fight the good fight.

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).