Jul 08, 2015
What’s the problem
The Internet is a pretty good place to get answers.
But it runs into trouble with topics that are
Debatable
Ambiguous
Nuanced
Complex
Evolving &
Sample DANCE Questions
How can Islam call itself a “religion of peace”?
How come Asians are all
good at math? Why
are black athletes
better than white
athletes?
Are people really “born” gay?
It’s the 21st century. Why do minorities still obsess over race?
Why are women such bad drivers?
What are the hottest hot-button issues about?
Race Gender
Sexuality Ethnicity Culture Identity
Questions about these topics are the most frequently asked — and
furiously argued — on the Internet.
And the same points, often based on misconceptions, are made
again and again.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091010220811AA4S9mT
Example: Yahoo! Answers
No.
A search for “blacks extra ligament” gets 349,000 results.
And most of the top results are misinformed. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=blacks+extra+ligament&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
There are people trying to tackle the problem online — with insight and often, humor
But there’s no single site that brings credible answers to these hot-button questions together in one place.
Books and Documentaries
Wikipedia entry on race and sports
Academic Texts
?
Factchecking sites are now a central voice in political conversation — why not in other debates as well?
is the factcheck desk for the Internet
— an online platform for curating, aggregating and sharing authoritative answers to hotly debated, frequently
asked questions.
How it works
Open Access
Anyone can submit questions
Registered users can uprank, respond to and comment on questions and responses
Logically Organized Questions are put into categories as they are submitted, ensuring that questions are grouped into topics and reducing duplicate submissions
Expert Verified
Topic categories supervised by Experts
Experts provide and update Verified Answers, informed by the crowd
Active users can be promoted to Expert status
VERIFIED ANSWER
THIRD-PARTY LINKS
RESPONSES FROM THE CROWD
Modular Structure
Users can select and assemble questions to create their own customized FAQ pages on the site
Modular Structure
These Custom FAQ pages can easily be linked to by or embedded in external websites.
Publicly Embeddable
<embed>
Publicly Shareable
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091010220811AA4S9mT
Uh…maybe you should check out this: http://cluef.ly/31747
Custom FAQ pages or individual answers can also be linked to in online conversations via the Cluef.ly “shortlink” service.
<cluef.ly>
Business model
Race, identity, culture focus
ADVERTISING
Expand focus to broader range of topics; build out FAQtbase platform
ADVERTISING CONSUMER INSIGHTS EXPERT REFERRAL
Roll out FAQtbase platform for enterprise
PLATFORM LICENSING
NOW YEAR ONE YEAR TWO
BETA
Revenue Sources
§ Advertising, expert referral, insights
§ Intranet: Proprietary licensing of Cluefly’s FAQtbase platform for use in internal knowledge sharing
§ Extranet: Licensing of Cluefly as a white-label, external-facing ExpertNet
ENTERPRISE INTRANET
EMBEDDED EXPERTNET
Opportunity and competition
Market Size
Wikipedia now has over 17 million articles in 270 languages, receives over 400 million visitors per month, and — based on 2010 estimates from Business Insider — would be valued at over $5 billion if it took paid advertising. Pearson PLC estimates that Wikipedia gets approximately 20% of all online reference user traffic
$100 billion
Competition
Revenue model
Advertising (Cluefly.com); subscription (FAQtbase)
TBA Donations Subscription
Content source Crowd + experts Crowd Crowd Published commercial sources
Content validation
Expert verified None (author identity transparent)
None (author identity hidden)
Trusted content creators
Distribution model
Public site; partner sites; proprietary intranets
Public site Public site Proprietary intranets
Summary § Central repository for authoritative answers to hotly
debated, frequently asked questions — initially focused on race, culture and identity.
§ Crowdsourcing to generate hot-button questions and current, relevant responses. Experts to validate and update “certified” answers
§ Ideal solution for a intranet-based knowledge system
§ Powerful tool for identifying what users/customers want to know — and for turning staff into public experts on those topics
The factcheck desk for the Internet