Friday, February 02, 2007

Wisdom of crowds indeed

I'm doing a project for work that has involved playing around with Yahoo!Answers. If you haven't tried it out, it's a pretty nifty concept. Questions are posted and answered by visitors to the site. People are incented to give good answers by a number of mechanisms that introduce a civilizing dose of karma: each user keeps a balance of points. Points are taken away whenever you ask a question, but you are awarded points whenever you provide an answer. There's quality control, too--when your answer is chosen as the best answer by the "asker," you get a nice handful of bonus points.

So I decided to do my part and answer questions where I have some expertise. I got a Biology degree at Fair Harvard so I thought, hey, I'll start by browsing the Biology section. I'll weigh in on a few questions, see what's going on, get a sense of the user experience... that is, until "johnny" decides to rain on my parade by reminding me not only of the humiliating state of this country's educational system, but also of its self-assured swagger and emphasis on truthiness:



I thought, this must be some kind of joke... there must be some people out there with more sense than "johnny," or at least more sense than Jessica Simpson, right?

Right?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have quite the accurate rendition of yourself in your avatar.

Anonymous said...

i was going to say the same!!
but anyway my other comment - so it's people like you who provide those answers! well then i feel like i'm in good hands. :D

Sheena said...

Haha, the avatar was a fun activity. You get to pick an entire outfit!!