Go ahead, just ask a question
WHAT’S the optimal temperature for storing white wine? How old is too old to sleep with a teddy bear? Can you make liquor from broccoli?
Ask Peter Trask. He will tell you that white wine is best stored at 50 degrees, that he occasionally sleeps with a teddy bear at age 48 and thinks it’s fine, and that broccoli can be made into liquor but not a very tasty one.
The accountant from Pembroke, Mass., spends a couple of hours every night answering questions like these posed on answerbag.com, where members post queries on topics as diverse as philosophy, math, dancing and religion. He’s offered more than 1,000 pieces of advice since stumbling onto the website a year ago.
“I’m a wealth of useless knowledge,” he said. “I have more contact with some of these people than I do with my own brothers and sisters.”
The Internet is packed with specialty sites devoted to just about every ailment, passion and topic. But millions of people also seek answers from armies of volunteers such as Trask on sites like Answerbag, WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers. The leader, Yahoo Answers, attracted nearly 20 million visitors last month, according to Web measurement firm ComScore Media Metrix.
When it comes to answering questions, expertise is preferred -- but none is required. Anyone on these services can ask or answer a question.
Many of the self-appointed authorities spend hours crafting their responses. They cite many motivations: to contribute to the greater good, fend off boredom, procrastinate as work looms or earn recognition.
They’re the online equivalents of the neighborhood busybody, the helpful librarian or the sage professor. Often, that’s who they are in real life, too.
By day, Lisa Poirier is comparative religion professor and director of graduate studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. By night, she’s “Professor X.” After dinner, the 43-year-old Poirier winds down by logging into her Yahoo account and fielding questions on higher education.
She has referred people to colleges with horseback riding programs, counseled students on getting into graduate school and doled out opinions on various colleges. Once, when an Afghan woman posted a question about how to study in the U.S., Poirier offered her knowledge of organizations that provide full scholarships to women from Afghanistan.
“While my partner plays video games, I answer questions,” Poirier said. “It’s my own game.”
Like any good game, answering questions can be addictive.
“I get withdrawal symptoms when I don’t go on,” said Jacinta Rachel, a biology student in Liverpool, Britain, who spends up to five hours a day fielding questions on Answerbag under the moniker “Carmella.” “Like if you leave home for a while, you can feel quite homesick -- that’s the feeling I get.”
QUESTION-answering websites cultivate that reaction by borrowing tried-and-true strategies from video games. For example, as Answerbag respondents supply responses that other members find useful, they can climb 69 levels, from Novice to Maestro. Yahoo awards points each time someone answers a question, and more points when the response is chosen Best Answer by other users.
Poirier has racked up about 21,000 points by serving up more than 1,800 answers, making her the top-ranked person in Yahoo’s higher-education category. The points can’t be claimed for any sort of prize, just credibility and bragging rights. Questioners can use them to help separate the good advice from the bad.
“I get a kick out of the fact that 82% of my answers have been chosen as Best Answer,” Poirier said. “That means your answers have a certain quality to [them]. Anyone can get on the site and answer a bunch of questions, but what good do they do?”
Indeed, there’s no shortage of silly questions and flippant answers. One poster posed this question on Answerbag: “If you were homeless, what would your cardboard sign say?”
Among the replies: “Sign for sale.”
But some people turn to these sites with the most serious of inquiries, such as “How to locate my birth father?”
Debby Fabela, 47, asked that question on Yahoo in August. Her dad had left her family when she was a year old. The Lake Elsinore, Calif., woman had tried to find him over the years, once by handwriting nearly 100 letters to people who shared her father’s last name.
Shortly after buying her first computer last year, Fabela revived her quest on Yahoo Answers. Among the dozen responses was one from Skip McKenna in Myrtle Beach, S.C. The two struck up a correspondence, and McKenna sleuthed online to help Fabela track down her paternal grandmother in Cleveland.
“The minute I got her on the phone, I was in tears,” Fabela said. “She was my lost link to everything.”
Fabela learned that her father had died years ago. But she also found she had two half brothers in Sacramento from her father’s second marriage.
She credits McKenna, a stranger who holds no particular expertise in genealogy, for reuniting her with her missing family.
“He’s my hero,” she said, “even though I’ve never met him.”
McKenna himself stumbled across the site in June. He found that he knew the answer to a posted question: What do you call those clips that hold plywood to a house during a hurricane?
He typed in the brand name, Plylox, and offered a link to an online store that sold the clips. Three weeks later, he received an e-mail saying his reply had been chosen Best Answer to that query. “I was hooked ever since,” said McKenna, a project manager for a computer consulting firm who spends three to four hours a day answering questions. So far, he’s answered more than 4,400.
“It’s not that I’m a know-it-all. I’m not,” McKenna said. “I’m a researcher. That’s my talent. I can use the Internet. I’m good at finding out what’s out there.”
After his successful -- and pro bono -- work for Fabela and others, some people seek him out for advice.
“It’s that validation that keeps me going,” McKenna chuckled. “It’s my 15 minutes of fame, so to speak.... Not that it’s what I thrive on, but it’s fun.”
Ordinary people become minor celebrities on these sites, eminent for their expertise.
Andi Woods is known in the health and beauty category of Yahoo Answers for explaining how to tame unruly hair. Her advice can include step-by-step instructions on how to shampoo, condition and dry curly locks. She also reviews products.
Woods writes from experience. A 25-year-old sociology student in Kersey, Colo., who goes by the online name “WickedMagnet,” she has spent years battling her own mop of hair. But she also dives into other topics, such as children and relationships.
“It’s validating what I know, that I’m smart about something,” Woods said. “I’ve doled out advice pretty much my whole life. A lot of it is just common sense. Some people don’t really know how to go about reaching the solution they’re looking for.”
Her candid advice has led a couple in South Africa to name their baby after her.
Linsey Rautenbach, who lives in a Johannesburg suburb, had just admitted her sister-in-law to a rehabilitation clinic and posted a message on Yahoo Answers asking if she had done the right thing. Woods replied with reassuring words, then, over the next several months, counseled Rautenbach via e-mail.
WHEN Rautenbach gave birth soon after, she named her daughter Taylin-Andrea.
“Andi’s part of our family now,” said Rautenbach, 23. “The answers she gave us were amazing. At times, the information was brutal. She just told it as it was. It helped us understand the situation better. And there she was, a complete stranger at the other end of the world.”
Woods had occasion to seek answers herself when her Manchester terrier became ill and needed surgery.
Nancy Shackleford, who had built a reputation on Yahoo as the go-to canine expert, came to the rescue, telling Woods what to do with the syringes and medications the vet sent her home with.
Shackleford, 60, is a retired maternity nurse in Harbor, Ore. She spends six hours a day answering questions -- more than 10,000 so far -- on animal care. Once, she stayed up until 3:30 a.m. coaching a woman in India via instant messages on how to deliver her dog’s puppies.
“I do this because I get thank-yous continually,” Shackleford said. “It’s just rewarding. I love animals, and I feel like I’m helping a lot of dogs.”
In some ways, complimentary question answering harks back to the community altruism of the Internet’s early days, when online discussion groups formed around hundreds of topics on a network called Usenet. Volunteers oversaw the exchanges.
“There was this culture of generosity,” said Caterina Fake, co-founder of the online photo-sharing site Flickr and senior director of technology development at Yahoo. “That was what drew me to the Internet in the first place. People would just put stuff up there just because they thought it would be useful.
“Then came the dot-com phase, and it became about the commerce. Now the Web is returning to its roots, and it’s becoming more about connecting people to each other.”
That’s what hooked Trask, the accountant with a knack for dispensing helpful tidbits on answerbag.com.
“There are certain people whose answers I look forward to reading,” he said. “And there are people who recognize me, know me, talk to me or look me up for my answers. It’s a community of people you have conversations with through questions and answers.”
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Begin text of infobox
Questions and answers
Number of unique users March 2007 versus March 2006 (in millions)
Yahoo Answers: March 2007 -- 19.2; March 2006 -- 3.9
Answers.com: March 2007 -- 13.2; March 2006 -- 6.4
Answerbag: March 2007 -- 0.5; March 2006 -- 0.3
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Source; ComScore Media Metrix