RIDDLE ME THIS, Quora users! (Photo: Wikipedia)

Quora, beloved source of information both practical and profound, has added a new feature that should boost users' chances of getting answers to their most pressing questions. It's already possible to ping recommended experts, using Ask to Answer. But starting today, you'll be able to see which of those brains are currently online and therefore more likely to respond in a timely fashion. 

The usefulness for us ink-stained wretches is pretty obvious. But for those of you who don't live on deadline, Quora provides a couple of use cases. Perhaps you are trying to decide whether Skyfall is worth your American dollars, but you don't trust Rotten Tomatoes. Or, more urgently: What do you do if you smell gas outside your home?

Says Quora:

Today we are pleased to announce an exciting new feature -- Online Now, a significant improvement to Quora's Ask to Answer experience. In Ask to Answer suggestions, Online Now shows you when people with knowledge about your question are online and available to answer, and shows others when you are available to answer.

For those of you who'd prefer to browse the site's extensive catalog of human experiences in peace, however, you can fiddle with your settings to remain invisible. But really, where's the fun in that?

Mr. Cheever (Photo: Quora)

Following the recent announcement that Quora cofounder Charlie Cheever will be taking a backseat role at the company, something of a revolution has begun to foment at the question and answer site so popular among the Valley's elite. For a platform which purports to embrace openness and honesty as its core ethos, its own staff has not been particularly forthcoming about Mr. Cheever's departure.

Social Times points out that a question about Mr. Cheever's status at the company was answered by Quora's other founder, Adam D'Angelo. Users immediately called Mr. D'Angelo out for his disingenuous reply, which was bathed in a thick coat of PR BS. One such indictment--posted by another startup founder--even garnered more upvotes than the original response.

Could Mr. Cheever's departure and the subsequent user backlash be a signal for what's ahead at Quora? Social Times kicks around a variety of theories about what's up at the startup, from a potentially imminent acquisition to flailing user adoption due to the site's inability to scale.

If you've spent any amount of time on Quora, the mean girling and cattiness becomes evident pretty quickly, and nothing turns off new users more than a powerful cabal of close-minded insiders. Doesn't anyone remember why Gawker initiated that whole commenting overhaul? Writes the Times:

Quora still exists primarily in its Silicon Valley echo chamber. The users who wield the most power seem intent on keeping it that way. Too often, once users outside that inner circle begin to make a mark — such as garnering deserved up votes too easily, or by questioning methodology and moderation — a backlash quickly ensues.  The less powerful users find themselves down voted to the point of having their answers collapsed into oblivion.  Then, they are aggressively pursued and forced to defend their subsequent contributions.

Social Times makes a convincing argument that Quora can't scale because it doesn't want to change the platform's negative dynamics, and in fact is working against the best interests of its own site. Upvotes to that.

(Photo: Magnetic Productions)

If Law and Order doesn't provide you with sufficient insight into those who protect and serve our fine city, perhaps this Reddit thread can help. A user named 10-13 decided to initiate an "Ask Me Anything" post last night about his experience as a NYPD officer.

Perhaps because the Occupy Wall Street fervor has ebbed, or because 10-13 is a well-respected member of the r/NYC subreddit, the questions weren't as pointed or aggressive as we anticipated. Maybe anonymous user names don't automatically engender bad behavior, after all.

10-13, which is top secret police code for "Officer in need of immediate assistance," answered users' questions with a distinct mix of wry humor and endearing admiration for his job. But our favorite reply had to be when he discussed the time he found a guy with a silver dildo in his mouth:

When we got up to the 3rd flood he was on the stairs with some kind of portable VHS/DVD player watching tranny porn and jerking off. Weirder still, he had a silver dildo in is mouth.

"Some people are just born with a silver dildo in their mouth," quipped a user named bunglejerry.

We would like to quibble with one answer, however. We have spent a large part of our lives allowing our legal beliefs to be dictated by Jay-Z's hit song "99 problems," primarily because of the following line: "My glove compartment is locked so's the trunk in the back and I know my rights so you gon' need a lawyer for that."

A lawyer recently did a line-by-line reading of the song and determined that--actually--officers can search your locked glove compartment without a warrant. World rocked. 10-13, however, maintains Jay-Z's party line, saying that the NYPD can't look in your glove box without a warrant.

So which is it? Those of us who take our legal advice from Mr. Carter are dying to know.

Ask.com

Ask.com, which also syndicates search and advertising solutions to a network of affiliate partners, says it has 60 million users. For a closer peek into the id of the internet-using population, the top questions of the year are below:

Top celebrity search terms and questions include:

1.     Kim Kardashian: Was Kim Kardashian’s wedding fake?

2.     Justin Bieber: Is Justin Bieber going to be a dad?

3.     Lady Gaga: Are Lady Gaga’s face implants real?

4.     Beyonce: Did Beyonce fake a baby bump?

5.     Kate Middleton: Who made Kate Middleton’s wedding dress?

6.     Ashton Kutcher: Did Ashton cheat?

7.     Michael Jackson: Was Michael Jackson murdered?

8.     Selena Gomez: Is Selena Gomez pregnant?

9.     Lindsay Lohan: Is Lindsay Lohan going to jail?

10.  Charlie Sheen: What happened to Charlie Sheen’s teeth?

Top news search terms and questions include:

1.     Earthquake in Japan: How big was the earthquake in Japan?

2.     Hurricane Irene: What caused Hurricane Irene?

3.     Steve Jobs: How much was Steve Jobs worth?

4.     Royal Wedding: What did William whisper to Kate on the balcony?

5.     Occupy Wall Street: Who started Occupy Wall Street?

6.     iPhone: When will Apple release the iPhone 5?

7.     Osama Bin Laden: Who killed Bin Laden?

8.     Casey Anthony: Where is Casey Anthony hiding?

9.     10^th Anniversary of September 11: What is happening on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11?

10.  Amy Winehouse: How did Amy Winehouse die?

Top political searches and questions include:

1.     Barack Obama: Will Obama get re-elected?

2.     Mitt Romney: What is Mitt Romney’s religion?

3.     Sarah Palin: Is Sarah Palin running for president?

4.     Michele Bachmann: Is Michele Bachmann crazy?

5.     Anthony Weiner: Where can I find Anthony Weiner’s Twitter pics?

6.     Arnold Schwarzenegger: Who was Arnold’s mistress?

7.     Gay Marriage: Which states allow gay marriage?

8.     Withdrawl from Iraq: When will the troops come home?

9.     Iowa Caucus: When is the Iowa caucus?

10.  Muammar Ghadafi: Who will lead Libya after Ghadafi?

Go to http://www.facebook.com/AskDotCom to get a more extensive list of top searches and enter for a chance to win the Amazon Kindle Fire.

Q: You always remember the ones that got away. Tell us about the startup you regret passing on the most.

A: That's easy. Twitter. It's not really fair to say that we passed, but we did not fight hard enough to get in to their Series C round.

Q: The last thing you want to hear from a founder is...

A: "It's a massive market and we only need to get 1% of it to succeed!"

Q: What “me too” trend should we avoid or invest in?

A: Transaction advertising and local commerce are real markets and are trendy right now, deservedly so. True, I wouldn't do a series A in a Groupon clone these days, that ship has sailed. But there are definitely ways to invest in me-to markets and still do well. I think the fascination with new ways to share photos is awfully over-heated and likely over-stated as a market opportunity.

Q: What’s the strangest pitch you've heard?

A: Those are usually the best ones. The ones that stretch your imagination and border on the unbelievable. When Cloudflare pitched us several years back, they were a bunch of security guys, saying that customers would be willing to send all their data to an external service in order to have it secured. At the time, it sounded nutty, but that is kind of what defines a great entrepreneur, they see things differently.

Q: What’s the best way to ride out a bubble?

A: As you know, Venrock is a VC firm that has been investing in startups for more than 40 years. Needless to say, this firm has seen many cycles come and go. Our approach is to keep our bar really high and invest in approximately the same number of companies each year, regardless of economic conditions or where we are in a cycle.

Q: Explain, without jargon, what the word pivot means to you?

A: First version didn't get traction, trying another approach.

"With the way social media has progressed, a lot of personalization has been lost. The purpose of this is to address the elephant in the room, and to thank all of you. It’s become quite evident that my time as an adult film performer has expired. Don’t worry, I haven’t found Jesus."

What Grey has found are some new outlets for connecting with her fans, and perhaps for putting some of the personal touch back into social media she feels have been lost. Recently Grey popped up on New York based video Q&A site VYou, which lets users record question and answer in the style of Formspring.

It's not clear that Ms. Grey totally trusts the platform yet. Instead of answering questions about her porn career directly, she uses VYou to direct folks back to her Facebook, ending the clip with a coy, "Shameless self-promotion, what can I say."

We thought it would be fun to select one or two questions each week that demonstrate the value of these sites, which are rapidly expanding to become a knowledge base that future generations of inquisitive minds will be able to draw on.

What better way to debut our series than with a question overworked young entrepreneurs ask themselves each week:

 

 

How Does Not Having Frequent Sex In Your Late 20s Affect Your Health and Welfare?

User Subramanyam Pidaparthy steps up to the plate: "Most satisfying sex is always in the early morning say 4 to 6 am and sleep again and get up. Sex - is like food, if you feel hungry - you eat food, a good 4 course meal.  Some will satisfy with just a samosa or tea.  Few would like to have bit more. Some will go and buy from outside, few will steal food. You saw the similarities I hope."

Absolutely. The similarities between great sex and great food is that we fall asleep immediately after each.

"Sex--not masturbation--will never affect you.  Sex with healthy lady will not cause any problem, MB also not an issue but you will age early--by 40 you look like 60 years old."

This explains our hairstyle.

"One warning that if you think that (most educated think like that) wasting sperm will make you impotent its wrong. Wasting sperm will not give you male child is also wrong in other words IT will give, particularly when the girl is from town or village. Got it?"

Got it.

"This is really what distinguishes us from our horizontal competitors whose names begin with Q," says founder Joel Spolsky. "They are trying to do everything all at once. There is no possible way to get all the cartographers, or auto mechanics or any group on Quora to feel like they own a certain topic area, and to be committed to making it great."

Critical mass on a certain domain might just mean ten or fifteen people who are particularly dedicated to the topic. As Quora has opened its doors beyond the initial user base of start-up employees and venture capitalists, it has run into problems getting users oriented and keeping the quality of its responses high.

The difference shows in the answer rate. Take these broad topic areas with a ton of activity on both sites:

Now this trove of knowledge will be integrated with upstart search engine Blekko, which is taking on giants like Google and Bing by offering users heavily curated results.

Blekko's idea is to help users can cut down on spammy search results by adding "slash tags" to help sort the web. Users can sort by political fields like "liberal/conservative" or by verticals like "tech/sports."

Stack Overflow's army of power editors will now curate the results on programming-related slash tags like "Java" and "Linux." It's a welcome chance for many to earn reputation in a community that's become notoriously hard for newcomers to enter.

"I'd be willing to help in the tags that I'm most active in," wrote user Tim Post. "I really like what Blekko is doing, and I love finding information that I need without having to sift through a mountain of crud."

Google is actually adopting a similar model, asking users to help it identify spammy sites it can block. But the Stack Overflow community is far more engaged and accurate than the masses on which Google is relying.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Answer: Not at all. Q & A sites are a kind of social network and a solution to problems with the Google's decreasingly-useful search engine. It's a crowded space—Tech Observer has receivered press releases this week from Ask.com, ChaCha and Answers.com, the last of which is relaunching soon.

Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow, the popular Q & A site for programmers, had some insight in hisinterview on We Are NY Tech this morning.

Spolsky also created Stack Exchange, a network of Q & A communities built around specific topics, like photography, cooking, gaming.

Any topic for which there is a scholarly journal merits a Q & A site, he said, pegging that number at between 20,000 and 40,000. "You need a minimum number of participants studying the same thing (400-500) which is about the same number as it takes to sustain a journal," he said.

The Q & A site Quora recently exploded, spreading from the earliest early adopters and taking hold with secondary early adopters (crucial group!) after being reviewed by tech blogger Robert Scoble, who gushed its praises. Two weeks later, the hype is still going.

Quora's innovation was to make answers not crap by requiring users to authenticate their names with Twitter or Facebook and having editors police content.

Spolsky's sites, due to their niche appeal, also filter out most of the Internet's trolls.

And if this whole Q&A thing doesn't pan out, Spolsky has a backup plan. "There isn't a single espresso shop on the Upper West Side that knows how to steam milk for lattes properly. I think at Starbucks they just put their face in the milk and blow bubbles," he said.

"I would open a cafe called the No Laptop Cafe. Hipsters pretending to write novels while they mull for six hours over one cup of brewed coffee would be banned. Instead, we would have real newspapers and folk singers."

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries