It was after midnight and my wife and I weren’t sure what to do, so we turned to the specialists, the Internet.

I found the Just Answer website where there was a section specifically dedicated to questions and answers about cats.

What’s interesting and a little different with the Just Answer website is that the answers really are provided by "experts" in their fields. My question about our cat was going to be answered by a cat veterinarian with 15 years of experience.

The other difference with Just Answer is that there’s a value placed on the answer from the experts. I had to commit to what I would be willing to pay for the answer if I ended up being satisfied.

If you’ve got a question you need answered and don’t want to rely on just what the generic wisdom of the crowds is going to give you as a solution, try the Just Answer website. The Just Answer site focuses and specializes in those questions you really want a solid answer returned: health and legal questions specifically.

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In searching for the answer to my problem online, I uncovered the Stack Overflow website. It’s completely free to join and there are questions and answers to just about any question the geeks around us might have to ask.

You can use the easy tagging functionality to quickly jump to questions that have already been asked by the site’s users. You can even take advantage of the “recent” tag cloud in the sidebar to see what topics are getting talking about lately.

Users have the ability to earn badges for their participation in the site as well. Badges are earned for asking questions, answering questions and just being a good community member.

The Stack Overflow website will now be one of the first places I visit when I’m looking for a quick answer.

Uncover some answers yourself at Stack Overflow.

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I tested the service a bit with a few technical questions about computers. The answers were appropriately targeted with additional information available in the comments from others that go along with the threaded display of the information shared. I like this format as many times the information shared in comments by others provides additional viewpoints and options for answers to consider.

After my technology questions, I switched to questions related to education and homeschooling, something we’re considering as a family. Just like with the technology questions, AnswerBag’s participants provide answers that exhibit a level of expertise on the subject that’s very much appreciated.

AnswerBag delivers a resource that’s well suited for the Internet: information and people. I think the next step for online search is going to be really combining these types of human interactions along with search algorithms to get more than what a computer by itself can deliver.

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One of the vendors I checked out at Blog World Expo 2008 last week was Crowd Science. I spoke briefly with there CEO, John Martin, and he gave me a great, simple overview of what their service is all about.

It’s really as simple as one of the statements on their website:

Traffic stats are only part of the story.

Stats like visitors and page views are only part of the information that’s really worth collecting about your site’s visitors. Crowd Science let’s your serve short questionnaires to your audience and find out more specific demographic information about them. That information has value to it merely because of the ability to then use the information to tune and polish your site for the group of readers you’re already attracting to your site. Or, perhaps you see you’re missing a demographic you’re wanting and you can then tune to attract a different demographic.

Using fundamental research principles, Crowd Science can help you create a model of your audience that reveals more than the records of IP addresses and page views. Our audience measurement service is able to build deep, topic-area-specific statistical models of the demographics and attitudes of the visitors to your website.

After finding out more about Crowd Science, I realized that they are the service that’s hosting the surveys being used on this site and other b5 sites as well. So if you’re prompted to complete the survey, we’d love for you to let us know a little more about you.

I’ve installed Crowd Science on a few of my own personal blogs so I’m really looking forward to finding out a little more about who’s stopping by my sites to visit and see what I have to say.

If you’re running a website, and it doesn’t have to be a blog, you can use Crowd Science to help yourself as well.

Uncover more about your audience with Crowd Science

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