Communities of questions and answers are gaining momentum all over the internet, a wave which begun with Yahoo Answers. AskVille.
com is the contribution of Amazon to this trend: a portal where users join to ask questions about whatever topic they are curious about, and get answers from other community users. In order to keep the questions interesting, they have to be worded in 120 characters for the title, with 1,200 extra character room, and can be answered in the week following its post; after that period is over, all the answers get shown and a voting period ensues. In order to post answers or questions, users have to create an account in the site, and they get awarded points for their answers, which is a way of implementing credibility systems like those used by eBay to rate how trust worthy an ‘answerer’ is, as per the opinion of those asking the questions. A good bit about the site is that users can post their questions anonymously; also interesting is the fact that users don’t get to see the answers posted by other users before them in order to make sure that everyone does their best to come up with unbiased and useful stuff as opposed to copying other people’s thoughts or facts. Interestingly, answers can be in text-only format, or include embedded videos, Google maps or any item from the Amazon catalogue. 
