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Directory:Akahele/Searching for answers (view source)

Revision as of 16:58, 22 October 2010

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     <li>Facts On Call, Inc. logo used courtesy of Gregory Kohs, its creator.</li>
 
     <li>Facts On Call, Inc. logo used courtesy of Gregory Kohs, its creator.</li>
 
     <li><span style="color: #000000;">Yahoo! Answers logo, <a title="Yahoo! Answers logo, Fair use" href="http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107" target="_blank"><span class="comment">fair use doctrine</span></a>.</span></li>
 
     <li><span style="color: #000000;">Yahoo! Answers logo, <a title="Yahoo! Answers logo, Fair use" href="http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107" target="_blank"><span class="comment">fair use doctrine</span></a>.</span></li>
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==Comments==
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11 Responses        to “        Searching for answers        ”
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Comments RSS
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Dan T.     
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I believe the Wikia answer subsite actually existed before its competitor, though it was pretty dormant until the other site came along.
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As for “how do I bond with my rats”, did he try CrazyGlue?
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Gregory Kohs     
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Dan T., I agree that the facts seem to indicate that the Wikia answer subsite DID pre-exist the Answers.com wiki.  I’d describe its early activity as “very dormant”.  Indeed, I found that Answers.com put forth extensive efforts to build and brand and market their site, all while Wikia’s site just sat there like a bump on a log.  Only after Answers.com found relative success with their site did Wikia seem to “wake up” and decide that they had had a similarly brilliant brand name, some longer period of time ago.  I have no remorse in describing the latter activity as “copycat”.
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A similar conundrum exists around the “Budweiser” brand name.  Budweiser Bürgerbräu was the original Bohemian brand, but it was later trademarked by Anheuser-Busch for use in North America.  When considering right from wrong on this, we ought to consider the production and marketing efforts that Anheuser-Busch invested in the brand, before we tear them asunder for mimicking an existing brand.
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Coincidentally, if a large company like Reuters or Encyclopedia Britannica were now to launch a brand called “Facts On Call”, I can assure you, I would not spend one minute of time fretting about it, because I chose to abandon claim to that brand.  As a matter of fact, even while Facts On Call was an active, incorporated entity, the New Jersey Lawyer publication launched a “Facts-on-call” fax service for court documents.  I chose to discuss the problem privately with them, without involving lawyers, and both brands co-existed without harm.
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RFK     
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Do I remember AltaVista? – I’m still using it – and loving it!
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MightyUnderdog     
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Not to split hairs, but I thought Budvar was the original Bohemian brand, and is now distributed in North America as Czechvar.
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Gregory Kohs     
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Split hairs all you want.  It’s a long story, that as far as I can tell, actually has TWO main breweries in Bohemia competing for the name, and then Anheuser-Busch came into the story.
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http://www.budweiser1795.com/index.php?s=2&l=2
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http://www.budweiser1795.com/index.php?s=2&a=1&l=2
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Gregory Kohs     
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I have been mildly upbraided by another observer whom I know and respect, and he’s right — I’m playing loose with the fact that Wikianswers did, indeed, pre-date WikiAnswers — so it is merely petty and unfair to say that Wikianswers is the “copycat” site.  I have modified accordingly the blog post above.
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That being said, a detailed inquiry shows that FAQ Farm was a project launched in 2002 by Chris Whitten.
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Answers.Wikia.com was launched November 2004 by someone named “Hemanshu“, who decided to brand it as “Wikianswers”, then made only two more contributions to the site. The site was mostly unused until January 2009 (before which, there were always under 2,000 unique visitors per month, according to Compete.com — by comparison, my humble MyWikiBiz site has gotten over 2,000 visitors since the month we re-opened it as a wiki directory, with an average of 13,000 visitors a month for the past three months.)
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Angela Beesley (co-founder of Wikia, Inc.) made edits to the Answers.Wikia.com (or “Wikianswers”) site in the following proportion:
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2004 – 14 edits
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2005 – 11 edits
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2006 – 31 edits
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2007 – 1 edit
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2008 – 1 edit
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2009 – 500+ edits
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Meanwhile, back in November 2006, Answers.com purchased Whitten’s FAQ Farm. The buyer re-named it “WikiAnswers” (from Wiki.Answers.com) to better fit the Answers.com brand line. As far back as March 2008, Wiki.Answers.com (”WikiAnswers”) was getting 7,500,000+ unique visitors per month, while Answers.Wikia.com (”Wikianswers”) was getting about 1,200.
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So, while the blog post is now corrected factually, I hope that this comment underscores that “first to a name” (which was never protected with a trademark) means little if your competition is a more enterprising operation capable of building a more popular and better-organized web destination.
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Anthony DiPierro     
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Greg, I think you’re missing something quite key. Whitten claims to have registered wikianswers.com in June 2004.
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Al Tally     
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You could have discussed text-based answer services, such as http://www.text118118.com.
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Gregory Kohs     
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Anthony:  You’re right.  In this Internet age, the “first to grab the .com domain name” is most of the battle for laying claim to “ownership” of a brand name.  If Whitten registered wikianswers.com in June 2004, and Answers.com bought the property from him, it does look rather silly for Answers.Wikia.com to say they were “first” to the word “Wikianswers”.  Considering my past interactions with the folks at Wikia.com (such as their hesitation and rudeness when I brought to their attention a group’s use of their servers to promote images of child abuse), I am not surprised by this evidence of false claim to “Wikianswers”.  Thanks for your research.
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Al: Yes, I could have and should have talked about other answer services.  My bad!  I have since discovered (and participate in) another sort of cool one — Vark.com (or, “Aardvark”).  The content of the questions & answers is typically unhelpful, but the way they ping you via Google Chat for answer help is pretty neat.
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Gregory Kohs     
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After producing 99 “Best Answers” and rising to the #3 top answerer in the Wikipedia category, my account on Yahoo! Answers has been suspended for “Terms of Service violations” that Yahoo’s form-letter system seems incapable of elaborating upon.  After the wiki-clique of teenagers there had gotten into the habit of “thumbs down” swarming on my answers, and for asking questions that personally attacked me (which the Yahoo! TOS folks seemed unresponsive to my take-down requests), I did admittedly begin to game the system with 4 sockpuppet accounts that I would use for voting up my answers.  The wiki-clique retaliated with what appears to be about 8 or 9 sockpuppet accounts, swarming on “their” favorite answer — which produced fairly ridiculous voting outcomes like this:
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http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AiqxckD2hXsJF4SHFjJZ.kFy.Bd.;_ylv=3?qid=20090519070830AAxBcLU
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(The “winning” response got 13 votes, while the second-place answer of “Hero you go” got 5 votes, all of which were generated by me and my sockpuppet accounts, just to demonstrate the “counter-attack voting” that was taking place.)
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Another example of vote-stacking (12 votes):
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http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AtsF3szE_zbh_FEgl22_Idpy.Bd.;_ylv=3?qid=20090520095251AAArqlv
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Now, it is interesting to point out that a month ago, prior to my escalation of the vote-stacking battle, “Best Answer” responses in the same category would “win” with only 2 or 3 votes:
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http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AqF3T4gDzJfVaVJLr7ubq9py.Bd.;_ylv=3?qid=20090430012528AAlkp5D
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http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AqF3T4gDzJfVaVJLr7ubq9py.Bd.;_ylv=3?qid=20090503125153AAKo0gd
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So, after gaming a poorly-designed, anonymity-protecting system to discover and illuminate its faults, my account has been suspended.  Left behind is a small platoon of teen-aged sockpuppeteers who think they are “in charge” of their fiefdom.
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What a fascinating experiment for me, and what an utter disgrace is the Yahoo! system of governance on that particular community.
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Gregory Kohs     
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This Yahoo! question and answer are worth sharing: http://imgur.com/4tdCP.jpg
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