Quora taps into the 'wisdom of crowds'

Quora is a recently launched social Q&A website that has been receiving more than its fair share of press lately.

It works on a straightforward idea; the user asks a question (either to the community or an individual) and you then wait for the answers. You can also follow questions, topics, or people and read all the updates related to them on your home page. It’s simple enough, but beyond that, some of Quora’s features are proving contentious.

One point of concern for example is the ability of users to edit others queries, potentially changing meanings and putting the whole notion of the ‘open source’ nature of the website into question.

In order to implement quality control on the answers people give, Quora employs a system of “upvoting” and “downvoting.” Upvoting a response displays it higher up in the queue of responses. With enough upvotes, an answer will appear first in the queue, implying that its content is of the highest quality because the community approved it.

We suggest that anyone interested in Quora signs up and give it a try. If you don’t like it, you’ll know right away. If you do like it, you can find yourself getting sucked into the site and jumping from question to question, checking out topics that you never even knew existed.

Catherine Becker, COO of AdConnection, attends the Westminster Media Parliamentary Forum at the House of Commons – Feb 2011

Catherine Becker, our COO, attended the Westminster Media Parliamentary Forum yesterday at the House of Commons, bringing together MPs with leaders in broadcast, media and regulatory bodies such as BARB and Clearcast to discuss and debate the up-coming changes in the Communication Bill. Nigel Evans, MP, spoke of the need to evolve the communications legislation based on changes in technology and the growth in TV channels. Darren Childs, CEO of UKTV spoke about the need to have flexibility and protect the smaller broadcasters against the growth in power of the terrestrial channels and the pressure to maintain the status quo. He also discussed the challenge of migration of TV onto other formats such as online and even viewing on Xbox and Playstation 3 and the need for the industry to understand the implications of these changes and the need to legislate for them.

Catherine Becker, COO of AdConnection, representing the needs of advertisers, challenged the need to look at potential for advertising on BBC to widen commercial impacts and create a fairer playing field. Nigel Evans replied that this would be unpopular with the large TV stations but there was a need to look at this as part of the on-going debate. Catherine has now been invited to take part in quarterly select committees to advise on changes and how they will affect advertisers to help shape the next bill.

Catherine, seen above with Darren Childs, CEO of UKTV and Ray Blaney, Head of Regulatory Affairs at UKTV, discussed the challenges of fragmentation, the impact of TV consolidation and the need to protect advertisers from unnecessary inflation. Catherine also raised the challenges of cross-media advertising results, discussing how advertising in online TV formats (pre- and post-roll ads, banners and other online formats during the programming) were still to prove their effectiveness, and the need to push product placement in online formats (ability to click on products within programming taking the viewer straight to the websites to purchase). This has been recently tested by Tesco, who as well as having their barcode app, are now looking at the ability to use the red-button during programming to download a product onto the app, providing true cross-media response.

Finally, Catherine discussed with Bjarne Thelin, CEO of BARB, the challenges of recording viewing data as these cross-platform technologies evolved. Bjarne cited the challenges of even +1 channels which were broadcast at different times to slightly different audiences as making measurement more complex as broadcasting evolved.