Online Q&A ???????????

Getting answers is not difficult in todays networked world but sometimes its very hard to sort out the answer you really want. Maybe you can google it, look in wikipedia, post the question in your blog or even send the ques. to your friends and family, You still may not find the answer you’re trying to find. But there are some websites that are all about answering questions! People from all over the world can see your question and you can get answers from professionals. Some of my favourite Sites which i look for answers are:

LinkedIn Answers — Mostly Questions on this site are supposed to focus on business, Finance and other similar stuffs.

WikiAnswers — This site, as it happens, is a wiki where you can add a question to a particular category. You don’t have to actually wikify either questions or answers, though. The site handles that sort of thing automatically.

Yahoo!Answers — Yahoo!Answers have more people roaming around than anyother sites i have found for Q&A's. If I’ve struck out everywhere else, I head to this site. This one of my personal favourites for Q&A, the probability of getting an Answer is higher in Yahoo!Answers.

Beyond these sites there are thousands of sites in the internet for Q&A's. If your question is more related to a profession you can also try Forums related to that topic, there are professionals exchaniging Q&A's in Forums. So you can get a better quality answer in a Forum if its more towards a particular profession. Forums are usually used to discuss on a selected topic by the users. By no means should you consider this list exhaustive, and if you have a site you prefer, please mention it in the comments.

Designing the Question
Not all questions will get an answer in these Q&A website, so you need to design or craft the question accordingily which helps the person to answer within less than 5min. Usually people dont want to give very long answers, I have seen that really broad questions usually get ignored in these sites. With really broad questions, there is a certain feeling that whoever is asking hasn’t done any research, and no one wants to do someone’s work for them.

Considering The Answer
Once you have received an answer do some research based on the answer to confirm the validity of the answer. Since some sites like Yahoo!Answers offer points for answering, some people will send junk answers. So do some google search to confirm the answer

There are also some sites offering answers from experts, the major difference is about the price. The sites i mentioned are offering free service. If you need something a little more reliable, though, it might just be worth investing in a few minutes of an expert’s time.

Answer Some Questions...
Answering every question you can, may not seem like a good time for you but still may be worth your while to spend a little time on one of the various answer sites. It can be a good way to kill time, especially if you stick to the relatively simple questions, but some people do it for other reasons. Many members of LinkedIn, for instance, answer questions to help build up their reputations as experts in particular subjects. Other sites (like Yahoo!Answers) award points for good answers, although some points systems may be arbitrary and I’m still not sure what value most of those points have. No matter what the reward, though, I firmly believe that answering questions gets my brain going and are probably better than the many YouTube videos I could be spending my time on instead.