A better class of answer

Photo / Herald on Sunday

If academic journals, with their annotated footnotes, bibliographies and peer review checks, are the Formula 1 cars of the information world, the internet can often seem like an old banger.

The web has brought vast amounts of knowledge into our lives, but the quality of its information can be hit and miss.

Enter Quora, the web company tipped to be the next big social networking phenomenon.

The peer-reviewed question and answer website was set up by former Facebook staffers Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever.

The tech community is lauding it as the next big thing because it gives decent answers to the questions people ask.

In just over a year, the San Francisco company has gone from being a little-known beta test site for geeks to a web forum that is so popular it has struggled to keep functioning online.

It has about 500,000 users, but membership is expected to balloon.

Question and answer websites are not a new phenomenon.

Yahoo, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn invested considerable sums in providing answers. But users have often complained that the quality of the responses varies dramatically - from authoritative facts to poorly-researched nonsense.

Quora has won plaudits for the quality of its information.

Describing itself as "a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited and organised by everyone who uses it", the website disrobes the cloak of anonymity often used by the internet's more troublesome contributors by insisting that anyone asking or answering a question reveal their identity, usually by linking their Quora account to websites such as Facebook or Twitter.

Quora has become the place where academics, professionals and experts gather to impart wisdom.

When one user wondered what Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz thought of the film The Social Network, Moskowitz himself answered (he wasn't a fan).

Critics suggest Quora will become less authoritative the bigger it becomes, especially if the type of people that often dominate rivals like Yahoo! Answers start using it.

"Maintaining the integrity of our system is really important to us," D'Angelo told the technology website TechCrunch. "So we're going to invest a lot in it as we grow."

- INDEPENDENT