It seems that there is a new trend for Question and Answer systems on the web. It might be that mailing lists, forums and other “old school” knowledge systems appear too boring / complex / slow and we want information and answers a lot quicker or properly channeled to us or to the issue itself. Experiencing the signal to noise ratio on many forums and mailing lists, this does not really come as a shock to me.

Yahoo Answers is a web service that allows you to pose a question and get immediate answers from thousands of Yahoo users. After a day you either choose the best answer or the people answering vote for what was the best answer. The idea is to store all the best answers and thereby accumulate a vast knowledge base. Every answer gets points, those chosen as best answers get bonus points and so on. The points are there for their own purpose, unlike Google Answers there is no monetary compensation.

Just as Yahoo Answers went live across Europe after being in beta for quite a while in the US, I stumbled over an interesting system:

QUNU is an contribution expert service much like Y!Answers, with the difference that it doesn’t store information or content but connects you to real people answering on their IM clients. The system uses Jabber – which is every geek’s favourite. The idea is pretty sweet but I had a hard time seeing the innovation in it – from a communication channel point of view. If you look closely it appears to be something like a fancy IRC client with rounded corners. The difference is that you can search, tag and add other meta data to questions. Well worth taking a second look and dabbling in it a bit.

Another service that made me go “hmm…” is Ether which allows you to sell your services giving advice over voice-over-ip on a per-minute basis. Sounds like all these funky telephone numbers offered on late night TV get a stiff competition there.

It is great if a company offers their data to developers to use on their own sites. It is even better when it is pretty painless to embed this data into your own products. Nearly all of the Yahoo! services also offer a REST API to use results of searches in your own web sites – the difference to a lot of other services is that you could also have the data in JSON format rather than XML.

What this means? You don’t really need any Ajax trickery to use the data, a simple SCRIPT tag is enough.

Find out more about Embedded Dynamic Web Search Forms with JSON

This will probably be a first in a series of tips and tricks with the Y! APIs.

Dude, check this out

This does not throw a syntax error. First one to see through my crazy trick can take a cookie from the jar in the kitchen!

The cookie goes to Matthew (check the comments).

Explanation: You can set labels in JavaScript (as explained in an earlier post) by adding a colon to a name, and all a URL does is create a label with the name ‘http’. As the double slash is following the colon, the JavaScript interpreter only recognises a label followed by a comment.

Gabbly is a really interesting approach to the issue that you need to discuss designs with clients and peers. It is a chat panel that appears on any page (except for those that redirect the user) when you add the URL as a parameter, for example

http://www.gabbly.com/www.wait-till-i.com

It is a matter of time before there will be some legal issues with that (libel and all that), but is a really nice idea!

You’ve read enough of my stuff, now it is time to see and hear me talk (if you are able to do both). This means not only will you be able to listen to some stuff I have to say, no, you can even ask questions and shout at me without risking comment moderation.

Stuart Colville of Muffinresearch has organised the first Web Standards Group London Meetup and I was asked to give a presentation on “something about modern JavaScript”. He also asked Andy Budd to talk about “something about CSS and web standards”.

Hence I pondered and came up with the idea to hold a concept/idea/tips and tricks session about “Maintainable JavaScript”. This means I’ll talk about how to create JavaScript that will not come back to you for maintenance but make it easy for colleagues, clients and other third parties to change the look and feel and even the content of your scripting solutions.

In any case, it’ll be an interesting evening and there’ll be book giveaways (with mine being released 3 days after the event) and drinks to make you forget what Andy and me talked about. So go to the site, sign up and I’ll see you on the 14th of July in London’s beautiful north (I can take a bus home, or cycle!).