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.

Those were all answers to questions you didn't ask, though, we just thought of them ourselves! We want to know what questions you, dear readers, would like answered. We expect they'll often be more sophisticated than the ones answered above, but they don't have to be.

Several of us on staff have experience as consultants; consider this an opportunity for free consulting plus input from other industry experts and our community of readers.

What Kinds of Questions?

How many developers does it take to screw in a wiki? We're not sure about that, but if you've got questions about using wikis at work, uploading videos from vacation, social search for spiritual salvation or anything like that - the new ReadWriteWeb Question of the Day is going to be for you.

Technical questions, strategic questions, marketing questions - we're open to all of them. Whatever we think our readers will find interesting we'll answer publicly and point you towards good places to learn more. Look for OPML files of the best blogs on the topic you ask about and custom search engines you can search for more. Because that's how we roll.

We're looking forward to hearing from you. We'll start posting answers to the most interesting questions we receive on Monday.

In response to one of the questions posed on the homepage, project partner R. David Lankes explained the difference between this and an online directory like DMOZ.org. Instead of building out a directory of sites, the Reference Extract project will instead focus on answering "real questions around the world." By answering a lot of questions, the service scales up and generates a lot of "semantic richness" with which a search engine and other services can be built, says Lankes.

He also notes that the engine isn't really trying to compete directly with Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo as an everyday search tool. Although some people might begin searches directly from the Reference Extract homepage, the other search engines will end up returning results from the project and thus leading new users to click through for the answers they need.

That last bit sounds a lot like the model Wikipedia uses. Sure, you can search Wikipedia from its homepage, but you're more likely to Google something and end up on a Wikipedia page that appeared at the top of the search results.

However, unlike Wikipedia, Reference Extract won't simply focus on basic facts about people, places, or things, but will answer questions on a wide range of topics, just as librarians do today. In the end, the project may not out-Google Google, but it will lend something to search results that we've never had before: credibility.

One of my favorite uses for Twitter is for getting feedback on something or getting an answer to a question. In fact, asking questions was one of the points we covered when we talked about using Twitter to boost your social news profile. But until now, there wasn't a very easy way to ask questions and manage them along with all the answers you receive. Furthermore, it was nearly impossible to answer someone else's question and be able to see (chronologically) answers from other people that responded. This is where @answerme (site) comes in.

@answerme (Twitter account) is an almost two month old service that facilitates tracking questions you ask on Twitter and managing the answers you receive, as well as monitor the questions that others are asking and allow you to respond to them if you'd like.

Imagine Yahoo! Answers lite built on Twitter and you've got a good idea of what we're doin' here.

The most basic use of the service is to tweet a question in the format "@answerme [insert-question-here]," which is then picked up by the answering service and displayed on their site for others to respond to. For example:

To answer a question someone else has posed, simply tweet in the format "@answerme @questioner [insert-answer-here]," and your answer will appear on their site like this:

Finally, you can tweet "@answerme [status-id-of-user] win" to indicate one user's answer as the winning response to your query. That's it for features at the moment but the service is working to add more features such as tagging and bot commands.

Grouping together questions with their responses isn't the only reason I like @answerme, though. I like it because I believe with some direction the service can become the kind of conversation threading that people have been looking for in Twitter (and the feature that people have been loving about FriendFeed). In fact, I believe that this is one of the features that the next evolution of Twitter needs to have baked-in. But while I can see the direction that the service will go in as more people embrace it and help it evolve, in its current state the service has a few problems that need to be resolved before it is really ready for prime-time.

First, since you can't make a profile on the site there is no way to sort questions or answers by users, by number of responses, or any other metric. Furthermore, since the service uses timestamps to group together answers, there will be many times when you're responding to one question, but the response gets grouped as an answer to another question because that was the most recent question a user asked (and the system assumed you were answering the most recent one). Just like the service has a system in place for declaring a winning answer, it also needs a system to indicate which question you're responding to. (It seems Summize is having the same problem trying to group @answerme conversations together.)

Ultimately, @answerme can be thought of as a ChaCha-like service for Twitter, but where answers come from people who follow you and are presumably interested in what you have to say or what you have to ask.

You can get updates on popular questions and get direct messages of answers to your questions by following @answerme on Twitter. Also, be sure to check out this ReadWriteWeb post from April in which we looked at 4 other polling apps for Twitter.

However many people have pointed out to me that my case is unusual. I have been in business for 30 years and have worked across many markets, in many countries and I have worked the LinkedIn system to get those contacts usable. This puts me in the early adopter end for people of my age, which means that more people like me are likely to use LinkedIn more aggressively in the future. That fits the original mission of LinkedIn, which is to enable people to rebuild their relationship networks built up over years in business. That has been totally successful in my case. I have re-connected with people that I worked with over 20 years ago who are now senior people in specialist areas and I have found those connections valuable in my work.

When LinkedIn Won't Work

However, LinkedIn is less useful to somebody without a deep network. For example, somebody just entering the workforce. Somebody who has probably had a great time at college using Facebook and finds the features on LinkedIn to be relatively primitive and well, kind of boring. And not that useful either, because while they can see who the right contacts are they are no more reachable than they are in ZoomInfo or any other public directory. Just because I have the name, address and email for Michael Moritz at Sequoia Capital does not mean that he will return my email/call. And having a way to spam him via InMail does not really help. Actually Michael Moritz and I attended the same college at the same time and he still won't return my email via LinkedIn. Probably, he knows that we did not actually meet at college and I probably want to pitch him on an investment. (Really, Mr. Moritz, I don't have a pitch for you... well not now at any rate.)

So even if I pay to upgrade to LinkedIn Business for $20 per month for the privilege of spamming (sorry, sending InMail) 3 people I don't know every month, it won't be much more useful than renting a list from a good old-fashioned arms dealer to the spam industry (aka the list rental industry, sometimes called Database Marketing). I have not upgraded and don't intend to on those terms. Herein lies a possible flaw in LinkedIn's business model - the people who will pay are the people without networks who need to sell to those who have networks, which may end up disappointing both parties.

Getting Results Without a Network

Which is why my recent use of LinkedIn was so significant. It did not require my existing network to get results. I used the Questions & Answers feature to get answers to two real world questions. Both involved finding a specialist type of service provider that I needed in a hurry. I got the answer and I have hooked up with enough specialist vendors to get the job completed. Those vendors are now in my network. Done.

Before using LinkedIn, I tried Google. This eventually got me to some sites that maintained directories of these vendors, but it was still a lengthy process from there to get to a short-list. In one case my Google search got me to Yelp, where there was a rating for one of those vendors, but there was only 1 vendor in that category, so the rating wasn't useful.

Using LinkedIn, within 24 hours, I got recommendations on more than one vendor that were precise and ended up being very useful in finding a good fit.

The next day, by accident, I discovered a problem, though I think this problem is fixable by LinkedIn. The day after doing this search, I was talking to a friend about an entirely unrelated matter. He asked me if I had found that vendor that I was looking for. He was just making conversation, but I was concerned. "Did you get an email from me on this?" I asked him. It turns out that Questions send InMails (emails within LinkedIn) to all my contacts. I had no intention of spamming all my contacts to help with my fairly simple search. Sorry. Really. The form on LinkedIn specifically asks me if I want to restrict the Question to my contacts. I did not. I assumed that I needed to trawl wider than that. However I assumed (incorrectly it seems) that my contacts would not be sent InMails.

That is easily fixable by LinkedIn. They will have to fix this or risk really turning off their core community and fall into the, "oh, no, another annoying spammy tool" category. I am confident that LinkedIn is alert to this danger and will fix it.

What I assumed happens is that people with expertise in the area that I was interested in register on the site as willing to look at Questions relating to my area of interest. I am fully aware that this is self-selecting and will get me people with a commercial motivation to provide an Answer. Thats OK, I was not born yesterday, don't believe in Santa Claus and don't believe everything I read online or in print. Questioning every source is an ingrained and essential habit for most people. It still got me a useful short-list quicker than any other source. I did not need to perform lengthy searches on Google for a specialist directory or forum.

Conclusion

LinkedIn clearly needs to develop this feature more. Apart from preventing the spamming of my contacts, I expect them to refine the selection of experts. This is already self-selecting. When you send a Question, you select from categories and sub categories from a taxonomy that is quite intuitive for business people. I selected Hiring and Human Resources and then from that I selected Staffing and Recruiting. That means my Question only went to people who claim expertise in Staffing and Recruiting, which is like an uber-forum capability. I don't need to find a forum to find an expert, I just send a Question and the expert finds me. I can envisage LinkedIn refining the taxonomy further to get more fine-grained areas of expertise as the network grows. They will have to remain alert to commercial manipulation as vendors get more savvy about using this, but there are now fairly well established ways to do that and LinkedIn is a controlled environment, so they can lock out an offender. The Internet, on the other hand, cannot lock somebody from sending emails, despite valiant efforts by the spam cops, and LinkedIn seem quite vigilant to this danger.

I am not sure if this works as well in Facebook. In LinkedIn, business people work to a defined taxonomy that is well accepted. In Facebook it is way more free-form and that is probably a lot more fun. But if Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web, is "the combination of mass collaboration and structured databases" (my definition) then I may have just seen the early signs of Web 3.0 in action. And it helped me to Get The Job Done.