One of the biggest trends in the Web 2.0 world is the concept of “Crowdsourcing”. According to Wikipedia this is defined as such: “Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.” So basically you write on your site: “give me an opinion of how I should do my super cool tattoo” and everyone gets their two cents theoretically contributing to a better output.
This is the concept of Answerit24. Users ask questions and then the community answers those questions. In theory a great concept but in reality proof that Web 2.0 and especially the concept of crowdsourcing is only as smart as your users. It must be mentioned that Answerit24 is a direct clone of Yahoo Answers and smacks of a lack of originality.
On the front page the newest pseudo-intellectual questions include: “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”or another favourite of mine: “Where are you all typing from?”. Correct me if I’m wrong but surely Media24 can afford to employ someone (even on a part time basis) to actually clean up the questions on the site? In theory the concept of giving people the ability to answer other users questions is pretty clever. This is especially so if the question actually has some benefit.
I’m very tempted to go write a question “What did I eat for breakfast this morning?” and see what the response is. I’m sure I’d get an answer as there is some sort of ranking system where those who answer the most questions get points. This system leads to the dumb users being fed as people want to climb the ranks.
Ultimately this could be such a useful site but is ruined by both low IQ mongoloid users (or 14 year old boys) who think their dumb questions are funny. Considering Media24’s Digg clone, Laaikit is horrendous and had hardly any content last time I looked at the website.
Could someone at Media24 get a bit of originality going in your online department as creating South African versions of successful international websites. They copied Amazon through Kalahari.net (which I must admit has been incredibly successful) and then created a Digg clone as well as a copy of Yahoo Answers. Clearly no one understands that South Africa does not have a big enough Internet community to create these types of site.
I think Media24 should change their slogan to the following: “Media24, lacking innovation since day one”
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