Sean Conner recently asked a great question about integrating a Question and Answer service like Aardvark or Yahoo Answers into Swiftriver. Here is our approach at Team Swift…
In a Swift instance, Aardvark could be used as an additional ‘channel’ of input. Existing channels are Twitter, Email, SMS, News, RSS (any RSS feed), and Other (the catch-all for items coming in via our API). The only thing the Swift app wants to do is receive content, allow users and our algorithms to tag that content, and based on user behavior it scores the originating content source.
As an example for Aardvark: Johhny asks the question “Did an earthquake really happen in Chile?” on Vark.com on Feb 28th, only a day after the quake actually occurs. Robert responds on Vark with “No, at least I haven’t heard of one.” Vark user Jeremy responds with “Actually, Yes. An 8.8 magnitude earthquake occurred in Chile on Feb 27th.” In Swift, the answer and the accuracy of that answer is more important to us than the actual question (which just provides context).
To integrate Aardvark in Swift we’d probably write a module using their API that aggregates Answers with the corresponding Question as the ‘description’. Example of how that data would post to the Swiftriver API:
Title: “Actually, Yes. An 8.8 magnitude earthquake occurred in Chile on Feb 27th.”
Description: “Did an earthquake really happen in Chile? – Johnny”
Time: 17:08 EST
Date: Feb 30, 2010
Source: Jeremy’s user id on Vark.com
Channel: Vark API
Lat: 10.31
Lon: 01.40
Tags: 8.8, earthquake, chileTitle: “No, at least I haven’t heard of one.”
Description: “Did an earthquake really happen in Chile? – Johnny”
Time: 03:10 EST
Date: Feb 30, 2010
Source: Robert’s user id on Vark.com
Channel: Vark API
Lat: 10.31
Lon: 01.40
Tags: heard, chile, earthquake
Within Swift this is the primary information we need to verify information. Users with a careful eye will notice that we’ve included location data that Vark probably may or may not provide. We can easily extract that info from the hosted service SULSa. Here, the source is what we’re scoring. The channel is just an indicator for the user about where the content is coming from. That said, the source is not Vark itself, nor is it the user’s answer on Vark, but rather the user id on Vark.
Thus, if Robert keeps giving inaccurate answers, he maintains a very low score in Swift while Jeremy is viewed as the more trusted authority. Now this approach assumes that Vark.com offers an API that allows for this type of data aggregation which I don’t think they currently do. Perhaps, it’s a question for the Vark team?
10 Responses
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If you have an existing community, why not let them ask the questions and answer them. If you want to go beyond your immediate community and/or grow it, then publish your Q&A on Twitter/Facebook (not just yours, but your users) and have them broaden the answer set.
If you have your own Q&A you can manage reputation more easily. You can also “feature” experts on your site and have the “crowd” as them questions directly. This means they get accurate answers to their questions from a reliable source.
The blending of “crowd” and expert content creates some of the most interesting results.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am the co-founder of YouSaidIt and provide a product to the that. So apologies for the self-promotion, but I thought it was relevant in this context.
@charles This post was all about integrating third-party sites like Vark and Yahoo Answers. We have no interest in running a question and answer service. That’s not what our platform is about.
Continuing the Discussion