Greg Hard

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Quora, and I wrote a post some time ago describing why I like the service. To summarize, the lack of spam, the quality of the content, and the integrated social graph are all reasons why Quora has become my third social network, behind Facebook and Twitter (excluding location services, of course). I use it daily and still find it valuable, especially when trying to learn the ins and outs of the Silicon Valley culture that I am interested in, yet not currently a part of. Depending on the nature of my question, I often find myself typing it into Quora before I check the other usual sources, such as Google.

Robert Scoble, whom I like and follow around the internet, once agreed with that assessment. Seems as though he now disagrees. Today Robert said, contrary to his previous position, that Quora is a "horrid service for blogging." I agree with that, but Quora is not a blogging platform by design, it's a social network around asking and answering questions. So while I find it to be an effective tool for information sharing and curation, it still falls somewhere in between the shallow waters of Twitter and the depth and control of a personal blog, replacing neither.

The comparison he makes with Answers.com and Stack Exchange is a bit unfair. Answers.com, along with Yahoo! Answers, deserves an award for being the least useful services for Q&A in terms of content depth, partly owing to the anonymity of the service. Stack Exchange is extremely useful, but only for programming related topics. Quora provides more depth than Answers.com and Yahoo! Answers without the sort of niche specialization that you find on Stack Exchange (though there are exceptions). And I'm not even going to get into this silly Quora Review post about the issue, either, as I think it's petty and unhelpful. Let's stick with an analysis of the product, shall we?

Where I agree with Scoble is regarding Quora's problems with moderation and user accountability. I agree that, increasingly, we're seeing issues with the accountability of Quora's moderation system and this is an issue that could end up getting worse as Quora fights to starve off irrelevancy and keep quality high (remember how I mentioned Yahoo! Answers? That's a model for what they don't want to become). I've personally noticed an influx of new users over the last few months, which has also led to an increase in low quality contributions. Quora needs to address that problem without alienating their users. It's a delicate balance.

Another open question he mentions is whether or not Quora is worth $80 million. But that's a whole different topic for another day.

I'm tired of hearing everyone bashing Demand Media. Sure, they fill the Google search results with mind-numbingly useless drek and "how-to" articles on nonsensical topics. But the whole point of this type of content is to find out what people are searching for and write (seemingly terrible) content that is optimized to rank highly in search results. What this means, of course, is that someone, somewhere, is searching for how to express a dog's anal gland. The short of it is that people search for, and find, the "drek" that Demand Media soils the internet with.

So who are these people who seem to crave what Demand Media has to offer? 

One example is the scrunchie enthusiast, with such helpful gems as "Ideas for Organizing Scrunchies" and, for the scrunchie impaired amongst us, "How to Use a Scrunchy." Once you master the basics, you can move up to the higher-level "How to Make Beaded Scrunches." Thanks to eHow and Demand Media, I know what I'm doing this weekend!

They also seem to be serving those who live in some kind of Matrix-like (or Kafka-esque) reality, except instead of there being no spoon, there are no buttons. While this scenario could arguably be called theoretical, or perhaps just insane, Demand Media is thinking ahead with their illuminating piece on the various types of push buttons. Did you know that "push buttons allows us to key in phone numbers on our telephone pads ... [and] are connected to other processes that send signals to landline operating systems and, subsequently, allow us to make phone calls"? Of course you did, as you're neither a complete moron nor from a parallel dimension in which buttons don't exist. (Note: The button piece has been removed from eHow, so I'm linking to it via the Google cached page. Because it's still pretty amazing. Apparently they thought that buttons are just too much for us unsavy internet users to handle.)

And for the socially inept among us (you know who you are), there's help for you, too. Do you know how to flirt? You do now! And once you've flirted your way to your ideal mate, learn how you guys can conceive twins (because everyone should get advice about child rearing from the Internet. It's cheaper than hiring a fertility expert.) Perhaps you're also so used to email that you've lost the ability to send actual mail. Then jump back into the 19th century and learn how to address an envelope.

And just because I can, here it is again: How to Express a Dog's Anal Gland. You're welcome.