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No ChaChing For ChaCha Guides

http://www.techcrunch.com/ 2008/ 09/ 07/ no-chaching-f...

ChaCha used to be a ridiculous human powered web based search engine that's best use appeared to be for killing time when bored. They raised a boatload of money from Jeff Bezos and others and eventually switched to an all-mobile interface. They also began offering their platform to third party marketers. But now there are indications that the company is having cash flow issues, even after a recent pay cut to guides. As before, the information is coming from their poorly-paid and poorly-treated human guides. Employees are simply not being paid, says one guide, asking to remain anonymous.

88 days ago

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ChaCha doesn’t care about Guides!
http://britta.tv/2008/11/26/chacha-doesnt-care-about-guides/
8 days ago in Britta.tv - Partner of iJoel.tv - Streaming Together · No authority yet

About a month ago, I became a Guide for the mobile answering service known as ChaCha. ChaCha allows people with any mobile phone – from basic flip phones to advanced smart phones – to ask any question in conversational English and receive an accurate answer as a text. In the beginning, I portrayed ChaCha as very professional, yet fun. The Guide Training was laid out very well– informational videos, nice PDF Tipsheets for you to print out, and of course, the KnowledgeBase. However, after I passed my initial test, and actually began answering questions, I began getting QC, which stands for “Quality Control.” Quality Control is supposedly just a nice way of telling you that you can do things “better.” Accuracy of answers, correcting Citation– easy to fix. After my first QC, I began to notice that I was minimally getting questions up until they just stopped coming all together. I contacted ChaCha via a nice little contact form they have on their site, and simply asked them what as going on, and how I could fix it. I got a reply the day after, stating this: “I checked into your account information and found that you are listed as active. This is probably due to a technical issue and I will send your information to be looked at by our tech department.” They didn’t mention at all if my lack of questions was because of my QC, but they did tell me they would get it looked at. Awesome! But, two days later, I still didn’t have any questions. So, once again, I sent in an e-mail regarding the matter. This time, I didn’t get a reply through e-mail, but I did get a question while being logged in. Problem is, I wasn’t at the computer to answer the question. It was sent to another Guide. I come back to the computer to find that I have been logged out of my Guide account, and not only that, but I can’t log in at all now! I get this beautiful little error that says “invalid username or password.” I sent in another report about this, but something tells me that I’ve been ChaCha-ed out of the game this time. Shortly after this happened, begin to research similar problems that Guides may be having, and I found this lovely little article on TechCrunch.com, called “No ChaChaing for ChaCha Guides“. Seeing as ChaCha has had problems taking care of their Guides in the past, it’s hard for me to believe that this could change in the present. I mean, there’s thousands of Guides all over the United States, so what could it hurt just pissing off one? Guides are the backbone of ChaCha. I don’t expect ChaCha to stand strong much longer with how they’ve been turning their backs.
the value of social Q
http://www.librarian.net/stax/2376/the-value-of-social-qa/
87 days ago in librarian.net · Authority: 372

As someone who participates in many “social Q&A” sites and who runs one, I’m always interested in seeing people talking about them. I’m much more interested in this whole phenomenon than I am in Library 2.0 generally, even though I think they’re package and parcel of the same thing: computer-mediated and -assisted interaction between people who are geographically dispersed but share other common interests. As librarians we think about this a lot. Our patron base is becoming more dispersed even as our funding basis remains, in most cases, local. First Monday has an article this month about these sites with some hard data, “Exploring characteristics and effects of user participation in online social Q&A sites” They use data from 55,000 Yahoo Answers questions (as an aside, Ask MetaFilter just reached its 100,000th question which was sort of exciting) and do a good survey of the existing literature. It’s an enjoyable read and really comes down to an elucidation of one of the first things I learned in library school: people ask their friends to help them with their information needs before they ask experts or professionals. Getting more granular about why this may be, and shifting the arena slightly to encompass the online world, this paper examines why. Gazan (2006) divided questioners into Specialists and Synthesists. Specialists are more like knowledge experts who provide answers without referencing other sources, while Synthesists are the ones who do not claim any expertise and provide answers with references. Gazan (2007) identified two roles of answerers as Seekers and Sloths, depending on whether they have continuous conversation/interaction with other members after posting questions. Seekers demonstrate active engagement with the community and pursue communication regarding their questions. Sloths do not pursue further interaction with community members after receiving answers to their questions. The article also looks into the Google Answers model for some insight into why it failed while Yahoo Answers succeeded. Overall, it appears that Yahoo! Answers has developed a responsive community in which users voluntarily participate as both consumers and contributors. In comparison, Google Answers featured many one–time consumers and a small number of contributors who could only cover one–third of questions. Based on these observations, we suppose that Google’s approach of controlling the quality of answers, by not allowing users other than pre–approved ‘researchers’ to answer queries, led to a failure of the service. Yahoo! Answers’ open participatory model, on the other hand, appears to be successful, with a strong community in place. Meanwhile, remember ChaCha? Apparently it’s not doing so well.
the value of social Q
http://www.librarian.net/stax/2376/the-value-of-social-qa/
87 days ago in librarian.net » Blog Archive » Overdrive and audiobooks and the pervasive ipod · Authority: 2

As someone who participates in many “social Q&A” sites and who runs one, I’m always interested in seeing people talking about them. I’m much more interested in this whole phenomenon than I am in Library 2.0 generally, even though I think they’re package and parcel of the same thing: computer-mediated and -assisted interaction between people who are geographically dispersed but share other common interests. As librarians we think about this a lot. Our patron base is becoming more dispersed even as our funding basis remains, in most cases, local. First Monday has an article this month about these sites with some hard data, “Exploring characteristics and effects of user participation in online social Q&A sites” They use data from 55,000 Yahoo Answers questions (as an aside, Ask MetaFilter just reached its 100,000th question which was sort of exciting) and do a good survey of the existing literature. It’s an enjoyable read and really comes down to an elucidation of one of the first things I learned in library school: people ask their friends to help them with their information needs before they ask experts or professionals. Getting more granular about why this may be, and shifting the arena slightly to encompass the online world, this paper examines why. Gazan (2006) divided questioners into Specialists and Synthesists. Specialists are more like knowledge experts who provide answers without referencing other sources, while Synthesists are the ones who do not claim any expertise and provide answers with references. Gazan (2007) identified two roles of answerers as Seekers and Sloths, depending on whether they have continuous conversation/interaction with other members after posting questions. Seekers demonstrate active engagement with the community and pursue communication regarding their questions. Sloths do not pursue further interaction with community members after receiving answers to their questions. The article also looks into the Google Answers model for some insight into why it failed while Yahoo Answers succeeded. Overall, it appears that Yahoo! Answers has developed a responsive community in which users voluntarily participate as both consumers and contributors. In comparison, Google Answers featured many one–time consumers and a small number of contributors who could only cover one–third of questions. Based on these observations, we suppose that Google’s approach of controlling the quality of answers, by not allowing users other than pre–approved ‘researchers’ to answer queries, led to a failure of the service. Yahoo! Answers’ open participatory model, on the other hand, appears to be successful, with a strong community in place. Meanwhile, remember ChaCha? Apparently it’s not doing so well.