ReadWriteWeb

Two companies that you don't hear much about these days have partnered to help improve online Q&A. ChaCha and Wolfram Alpha have now combined forces to improve the quality and depth of answers to online questions.

Stuck on a Ruby on Rails problem? Call Rails Hotline, a free helpline staffed by volunteer Rails developers, at (877) 817-4190.

Rails Hotline, which was just launched this morning, is powered by Pocket Hotline, a platform designed for companies to crowdsource technical support.

When Facebook first launched its Questions feature last summer, we predicted that things were "about to change dramatically on the world's largest social network." The launch turned out to be a bit of a false start, however, and the feature never took off.

Today, Facebook announced that It has launched a revamped version its Questions product, making it even easier to quickly gather "the wisdom of friends," rather than the wisdom of the masses.

On Thursday morning of this week I will be interviewing Gary Vaynerchuk, social media maven and host of the wildly popular Wine Library TV video podcast. You may remember we mentioned Gary a while back when reviewing his book Crush It!: Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, a bestselling book on how to use social media to boost your personal brand.

Every entrepreneur will tell you that recruiting the right candidate is important. While startups are constantly trying to find programmers that mesh well with their culture, team and work-style, one article suggests that companies still struggle finding candidates that know how to program at all. Jeff Atwood published a post this morning entitled, The Non-Programming Programmer with a stunning look at how many interviewees misrepresent their abilities.

Earlier today we posted about Answers.com's rise as a revenue and page-view generator. Through user-generated Q&A posted to WikiAnswers, the company is crowdsourcing heaps of daily content, ranking high in search across a variety of subjects, subsequently seeing steady traffic and, finally, cashing in via Google ads. It's a simple business model, but from a user standpoint there remains one question: Are we seeing quality solutions?

KillerStartups hopes to ensure that entrepreneurs get quality solutions. The company launched Startups.com as a WikiAnswers-style Q&A site specific to business.

U.S. government agencies can now officially use YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, and blip.tv, using special service agreements that comply with federal terms and conditions. Today, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced that, after nine months of negotiations, the government has signed agreements with these companies that will allow federal agencies to officially post content to these sites. The GSA is also negotiating special terms and conditions with MySpace and Facebook, and it has already determined that Twitter's service agreement is in line with federal requirements.

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

YouTube launched a handy new page last night that aggregates all the videos from more than 100 institutions of higher education around the US. YouTube.com/edu now serves up campus tours, free lectures, research and other college news all in one place. Search queries can be limited to the Edu part of the site as well.

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from.

Next week we're starting a new series of posts we call the ReadWriteWeb Question of the Day. In those posts we'll answer, with the help of topical experts we know around the web, the most interesting questions submitted by readers.

Just post your questions in comments on any Question of the Day post or email them to tips@readwriteweb.com with the word "Question" in the subject line. Our elves will start processing them immediately.