This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Bryan Liles. Original Post: I've been sucked in to Quora Feed Title: Smarticus Feed URL: http://smartic.us/feed/atom.xml Feed Description: Ramblings of a ruby hacker Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Bryan Liles Latest Posts From Smarticus

I love to consume information. As long as the subject is pertinent to my current interests, I will spend more than what one might consider a sane time researching and evaluating my interests.  A while ago, I learned about Quora. Wanting to wait until the fad would end or subside a bit, I waited quite a long time before creating an account.  Now that I’ve created an account, I’ve been sucked into trying to consume every last tidbit of knowledge possible. What follows is not exactly a review, but my inner self trying to rationalize with my outer self why I spend so much time on the site.

To anyone first joining the site, you’ll notice that is slow; almost annoyingly slow. I”m sure this can be attributed to its new found success and spammers and social media experts. There are a million and one social media experts on this site. More than I thought could exist in a dimension defined by our current knowledge of physics. Applying some patience will allow you find the real value.

After clicking around to familiarize your self with the layout, you won’t find much. At first, you’ll have to rely on the people you follow and the search to find interesting content.  After you follow a few people and topics, you can start having a much more passive experience (which I prefer) with the site. So far, I’m following topics from programming to startups to cooking.

Next, you’ll be asking yourself, “just what is this good for?” I truly can’t answer that question yet. I find it interesting to read about other people’s insights about their companies and the world around them. I also find it interesting to see that some people have so much to say about just about everything.

As a business, I’m not sure how they’ll monetize. I’m sure they subscribe to the, “if I get enough eyes looking at any particular thing, there is bound to be some money waiting for me”, so we’ll have to wait and see if it is around for the long term. In the mean time, I need more people to follow. Watching people vote up content is exciting to me.