Askpedia Blog

Monthly Contest Changes

We originally started our monthly contests to encourage people to ask and answer questions and surveys. We thought it would be a fun way of getting more people to participate. Since we began the monthly contests in the early Beta testing period, we've had a lot of great questions and answers.

However, the monthly contests did result in some instances where users tried to game the system to gain an unfair advantage. Whenever we discovered concrete evidence of malicious intent, we have taken appropriate action. As more and more users discover Askpedia, we're seeing a disturbing trend in attempts to game the system.

Therefore, we have decided to discontinue the monthly contests. We're going to take some time to come up with alternate ways of encouraging our users to ask and answer great questions.

In the meanwhile, if you have some suggestions or ideas on contests, please send an email to feedback@askpedia.com.

May Contest Winners

Congratulations to our May Contest Winners:

Category: Most Question Answers

1st Place: $50 - araza - Do you see it? .... Uh-Oh

2nd Place: $30 - smohpal - Broken Heart

3rd Place: $20 - lisalisa1 - Name something you never get tired of.??

Most Survey Responses

1st Place: $50 - psynopsis - DO YOU SMOKE?

2nd Place: $30 - smohpal - Google or Yahoo?

3rd Place: $20 - Ironman80 - Which one do you prefer? .... for breakfast?

Most Best Answers

1st Place: $50 - kc5255

2nd Place: $30 - Richard

3rd Place: $20 - smohpal

April Contest Winners

Congratulations to our April Contest Winners:

Category: Most Question Answers

1st Place: $50 - Abby1356 - What is the best cure for a hangover

2nd Place: $30 - smohpal - Ever been in Love?

3rd Place: $20 - kc5255 - What/who cheers YOU up when your feeling down?

Most Survey Responses

1st Place: $50 - smohpal - Men or women?

2nd Place: $30 - psynopsis - HOW OLD ARE YOU?

3rd Place: $20 - lisalisa1 - Big Mac or Whopper?

Most Best Answers

1st Place: $50 - smohpal

2nd Place: $30 - araza

3rd Place: $20 - Richard

March Contest Winners

Congratulations to our March Contest Winners:

Category: Most Question Answers

1st Place: $50 - smohpal - Love or Money?

2nd Place: $30 - lisalisa1 - Cheating ex-boyfriend:Once a cheater...

3rd Place: $20 - Cares - Cheating

Most Survey Responses

1st Place: $50 - smohpal - Which color of eyes most attractive?

2nd Place: $30 - Richard - How many televisions do you have?

3rd Place: $20 - lisalisa1 - Which do you prefer? Cat, dog or ...

Most Best Answers

1st Place: $50 - smohpal

2nd Place: $30 - Richard

3rd Place: $20 - araza

Best Answer Selection Changes

We recently rolled out some changes to question and answer rating changes and we received a lot of great feedback. Some of our users loved the changes but some of our users had more suggestions on things we needed to implement.

We listened to all of your feedback and we've been busy making some major changes to the way best answers get selected. We know it's still not perfect, but it's a big step towards a much better system for dealing with situations where the question asker does not take the time to make a best answer selection.

Question and Answer Rating Changes

Over the past month, we received a lot of feedback on how we can improve the automatic selection of best answers. We received a lot of great feedback from many of you and we're starting to roll out some of your suggestions.

The changes that we rolled out this month were designed to improve the transparency and effectiveness of answer ratings. Here's a summary of the changes to rating answers:

• Users now need to maintain a Question or Answer star rating greater than 3 stars to compliment answers
• Every answer now displays the list of users who complimented the answer in the "Comments/Compliments" section

February Contest Winners - $300 Total Prizes

Congratulations to all the winners in our February Monthly Contest!

We gave out $300 in total prize money for the following categories:

Askpedia Facebook Application

We're excited to announce that we now have an Askpedia Facebook application!

Facebook is one of the most popular and fast growing social networking services with over 70 million users and growing at over 2 million users per week. Now you can ask and answer questions on Askpedia without leaving the Facebook site. It all happens within your Facebook account.

The really exciting thing about the Askpedia Facebook application is that it's tightly integrated with all the social networking features of Facebook. When you ask or answer questions, Facebook will update your Friends. You can also send questions or surveys to friends with a few clicks so it's going to open up new ways of interacting with your Facebook friends.

To get started, login to Facebook and then add the Askpedia Facebook application by entering the following URL into your web browser:

http://apps.facebook.com/askpedia

Once you add the Askpedia application, you can select a new username or enter your current Askpedia username and password. If you want to use the same username for the Askpedia website and Facebook application, enter your current Askpedia username and password. If you want to keep them separate, you can choose a new username that will be linked only to your Facebook account.

Once you've added the Askpedia Facebook application, don't forget to invite your Facebook friends. It's really easy with the Invite Friends link and it's also easy to send interesting questions to friends using the "Share" button.

We're really excited by the Askpedia Facebook application but since this is first release, we know there's always room for improvement. If you have suggestions or feedback, please send an email to feedback@askpedia.com.

Monthly Contest Changes

The Monthly Contests have been a great way to recognize and reward our top users. Many of you have achieved impressive milestones and we're glad to see people recognized and rewarded for contributions.

However, we realize that we can always improve, and we've received some great ideas on improving the contest format. Starting from January, we're going to implement your suggestions by making the following changes to the contest categories:

• Question with Most Answers NEW
• Survey Question with Most Responses
• Most Best Answers

The new category for "Question with Most Answers" will be awarded based on whoever asks a question that receives the most answers in the given month. We hope that this encourages people to ask some really interesting thought provoking questions.

In addition to the new category, we're changing the contest award format. Instead of the previous winner-takes-all format, we will now provide awards for the top 3 users in each category. The first place winner will receive $50, second place winner will receive $30, and the third place winner will receive $20.

With these changes, we hope to make the contest more interesting and also recognize and reward more people for their contributions.

If you have any other thoughts or suggestions, please send email to feedback@askpedia.com. We love to hear from you!

Featured User: smohpal

Our featured user this month is Shiv Mohpal (smohpal) from New Delhi India:

How did you find out about Askpedia?

I was looking for an answer for a question and while googling I found your website. When I opened it I found great questions & answers and also awards for best answers which made me jump into the ocean of knowledge.

Askpedia Knowledge Widgets

We wanted to let everyone know that we have widgets that you can embed within your blog or social network page.

You can now embed a custom widget that show's your Q&A track record within Askpedia. This widget will always show your latest Q&A stats and it's a great way of showcasing your knowledge on your own website or blog.

Here's my personalized widget:

To get your own personalized widget, login to Askpedia and go to the "My Home" tab. You'll see a link on the right hand side to access your Widgets page. On this page, choose your widget size and type (Flash or Javascript) to get the customized code that can be added to your blog or social network page.

Yong Su Kim
CEO and Founder

Tips: Answering Questions

We wanted to share some tips on how to provide great answers on Askpedia. We've seen a lot of answers and the really great answers seem to share many similar characteristics. Here's a summary of some of the best practices we've seen on providing great answers:

• Provide an Answer based on your Personal Experience
  The most effective answers contain knowledge and wisdom that you have gained from personal experience. This is typically information that isn't available on a web page and it's therefore more valuable than widely available information or conventional wisdom.
• Provide Information from Trusted Sources and Identify your Sources
  It's okay to use a search engine to provide information that is available on the web. Search engines provide a lot of information and if you're good at using all the advanced features to find relevant information, you can always provide a great answer. Just make sure that you cite your sources so that the asker knows the source of the information. Also, you should always credit the original source of the information if you're going to contain excerpts from other web pages.
• Make your Answer Relevant and Focused
  We're all busy so nobody enjoys reading through a long and winding answer to get to the relevant section. Answer the question directly in the beginning and use the rest of the space to support your answer. Providing lots of details is fine, but don't provide details for the sake of making your answer look long and official. Having a shorter, relevant and focused answer will always be much better than a long answer with irrelevant information.
• Request Question Clarification
  Sometimes, it's hard to answer the question if there isn't enough detail. Instead of providing an answer based on limited question details, submit a question clarification request. The asker will be notified and they'll have a chance to provide more details. You will then be notified via your Alerts log when the asker provides additional question details.
• Make your Answer Easy to Read
  Last but not least, it's important to format your answer properly so that it's easy to read. You should try to write in sentences with correct grammar and punctuation. Also, try to break your answer into shorter paragraphs. A single long paragraph can be hard to read through, especially when there are multiple answers for a question.

If you have any other tips on providing great answers, please send them to feedback@askpedia.com. We would love to hear from you!

Featured User: Richard

We wanted to take the time to feature another person from our many active users.

Dr. Richard is a retired dentist who resides in Blackwell, Oklahoma. He is one of our most active question answerers who has answered questions on a wide variety of topics ranging from medical questions to food and education. He's racked up an impressive 647 answers since joining us in July, 2007. He has also asked 167 questions on top of all of his answering activity.

New Feature: Survey Questions

We wanted to let everyone know that we've just release a new type of question. We now allow you to ask survey questions where you can have people select a response from a set of predefined choices. Think of it as your own multiple choice question.

To provide you with an overview, here's a mini-FAQ on survey questions:

• How is a survey question different from a regular question?
  With a regular question, people respond by providing answers that they write. With survey questions, users respond by selecting an response from your predefined set of choices. They can also leave a comment with their choice to express an opinion.
• When would I ask a survey question?
  A survey question is a great way of asking for people's help in choosing between multiple choices or for getting people's opinions on an issue with multiple options. We also think it will be a fun way of interacting with others and getting to know their opinions on a wide range of issues.
• How do I create a survey question? 
  You create a survey question by clicking on the Ask Tab. You then choose to ask a survey question and you'll be presented with an additional option to create the multiple choice response. Give each response a descriptive name and also give it an optional custom image. You can have up to 10 response choices per question. Everything else is just like asking a regular question.
• Do I pick a Best Answer for survey questions?
  We currently don't allow you to pick a Best Answer for survey questions since they're really designed to get opinions from multiple people. We're currently considering the option of allowing people to pick the best comment so send us feedback if you have any ideas.
• Do survey questions have Rewards?
  Survey questions do not currently have rewards associated with them. We have some ideas around implementing a prize system (eg. random drawing from answers and giving rewards as prizes). If you have any suggestions, please send us feedback.

We released the survey question yesterday and we already have some interesting survey questions:

• Who would you vote for President if elections were held today?
• A quick survey on how the universe began
• What is your favorite Search Engine?
• is paris hilton dumb or smart

Check them out and let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions!

Yong Su Kim
CEO and Founder

Tips: Asking Questions

We're now seeing lots of great questions on Askpedia and we're starting to notice patterns in the great questions that get a lot of views and answers. To help everyone get the most out of their questions, here are some tips on asking great questions:

• Make your Question Subject Interesting
  Making your Question Subject interesting and descriptive will get more people to look at your question. Think of your Question Subject as an ad that needs to get people's attention.
• Use Question Details to elaborate on your Question
  Instead of repeating the Question Subject in the Question Details section, use this space to elaborate on your question. For example, you could provide details on why you're asking the question and how you will pick the Best Answer.
• Personalize and Humanize your Question
  Asking general questions are fine but questions related to a personal situation attract more attention. People relate to other people so the more personalized you make your question, the more likely they'll be moved emotionally and provide a great answer.
• Select the right category, tags, and location
  It's important to select the right category, tags, and location because Askpedia uses this data to help others find and discover your questions. By providing the most relevant question data you will increase your chances of getting the right users to find your question and provide an answer.
• Provide a Question Reward
  Questions with Question Rewards will get more people to view your question. You don't have to offer a large reward. Even offering a small reward will get more people to pay attention to your question and provide incentive for someone to provide an answer.
• Promote your Question and attract GroupAsk Participants
  Promote your question on Social Bookmarking sites or email them to your friends. By attracting more attention, you'll get people to join your question and chip in as a GroupAsk participant. This will definitely increase your chances of getting a great answer.

If you have any other tips on asking great questions, please send them to feedback@askpedia.com. We would love to hear from you!