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Link: Search Sites Try to Give Instant Answers - Yahoo! News. I bet these same queries would get at least a few more decent results at the Wondir engine. If the results themselves don't have the answer in our 2 million + Q&A archive, or our search results, the community might jump in with an answer in a few seconds/minutes.
Link: QTSaver: Welcome On board, Eddie ! Look's like Zeev has a new developer on board for his QTSaver platform, which Zeev describes as:
... my new research tool, QTSaver, which extracts info from multiple sites into one document, which then can be sorted so that in a very short time you can write an article without using a word of your own.
Zeev's first step towards his Education for All program. I'm more familiar with Q&A sites/services than education sites, but in terms of free web school's, one good one that comes to mind is Suite101, which just made all their online courses free (I believe).
I certainly like what Zeev is up to here: QTSaver: Education for All background. Please chime in and let him know if you are aware of any other chat-based online distance education initiatives out there, especially any using Skype.
Tags: distance education, Skype
From the beginning at Wondir we've all been very aware of the sometimes fuzzy distinction between what a computer/bot/search engine can answer and what requires a human response. PomeRantz posted on this very thing, quoting an actual list of basic assumptions as a backdrop for such a test, and then goes on to say:
... as far as I know, no study like this has ever been conducted. RQ: What information needs motivate the use of what medium of reference service? Or, RQ: What situational factors affect a user’s choice to use a specific medium of reference service? Someone please conduct this study. And then you get to proceed from whatever assumptions you want.
As far as my own thoughts go on this, I think it's not a binary either/or, but rather a spectrum with "there's a .000001% chance that a bot/engine can answer this" on the one end and "there's a 99.9999% chance a bot/engine can answer this" on the other, and the ability of the user to efficiently use bots/engines being a factor in this as well. The bots will be sufficient for answering closed-ended, simple, bite-sized facts and people will be best at answering complex, open-ended, advice-esque questions that may involve an ongoing back-and-forth dialogue.
Looks like MIT embarked on an ambitious Live Q&A service in 2001 that ended up getting pulled. Pomerantz goes into detail here.
Matt Koll, founder/CEO of Wondir, spent a lot of time analyzing the failure of Q&A platforms before concluding that most, if not all, were simply too complex to have a broad reach. For example, search engines require zero commitment from the user, beyond typing in a two-second query and clicking "Go." Most Q&A services, however, not only require an often involved registration, but a number of hoops to jump through as part of the Q&A process. My best guess is that the process just got too complicated (the first bullet point noted at Pomerantz) at some point to be worthwhile to the questioner and the librarian that had to master the software.
Btw, we'd be happy to talk to MIT about using Wondir Live Q&A as their platform. Of course, we'd need to tweak it for the digital-reference angle, but that's entirely within our reach.
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