Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

If you’ve recently visited the Answers Leaderboard, you may have already noticed some changes. When Answers first launched, the ability to view the point standings on a single leaderboard made perfect sense. However, as Answers has grown globally, the need for a bigger and better leaderboard has become more apparent.

The biggest improvement is that we now have leaderboards for each local Answers site. You can access your local leaderboard from your My Q&A, or Profile, page.

The point leaders can now be viewed in either an overall or weekly standings format. While the overall standings will not likely change as frequently, the weekly standings will offer a better idea of how Answerers stack up in the standings based on weekly performance.

For instance, on our UK leaderboard Crystal is the leader for both the UK Overall, and for the most recent week on the UK Weekly board. Crystal managed to attain over 6,000 points last week! However, even a Level 1 user could potentially find themselves at the top of the weekly board on any particular week.

This is especially cool for UK and Ireland Answerers, because we can now identify local leaders and more easily compare standings with the rest of the world on the Global Overall and Global Weekly boards. That’s right, we didn’t get rid of the original leaderboard, so everyone can still take a look at global standings with the added bonus of seeing weekly stats as well.

We hope you enjoy the changes, and be sure to let us know what you think in the forums.

–Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

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Dropping Knowledge is a unique campaign working for social change through the internet. The non-profit initiative encourages open dialogue on the pressing social questions of our time, promoting the worldwide exchange of views, ideas and sustainable solutions – and they’re teaming up with Yahoo! Answers.

Recently, Dropping Knowledge brought together 112 personalities to answer 100 questions submitted from all over the world.  112 digital cameras broadcast the answers coming from such thinkers as the Indian development researcher Anuradha Mittal, the Bolivian activist Oscar Olivera, the German Director Wim Wenders, the Ugandan ex-child soldier China Keitetsi and the peace activist Bianca Jagger.  All 100 questions were answered simultaneously, producing 11,200 answers and more than 650 hours video and audio material.  The broadcast was shown on September 9, 2006 by live-stream on www.droppingknowledge.org.  Following the broadcast, all answers from the forum are now held in an internet archive as a digital platform for schools, universities, non-governmental organizations (NGO´s) and the press; for socially engaged businesses, foundations and individuals around the world.

In conjunction with Dropping Knowledge, Yahoo! will be posting 50 of the best questions on Answers over the next fortnight. The questions range across some of the most important challenges facing us all in the 21st century such as how to reinvent economics, the politics of violence, ecology and understanding power. Dropping Knowledge are not afraid to ask big questions so your input and answers will be keenly anticipated. Each question will link through to the Dropping Knowledge site www.droppingknowledge.org where you are welcome to continue the debate.  It functions as a digital platform for new social thinking and through this network (developed by the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence), everyone can raise a free voice to bring about global social change.

The campaign kicks off on Answers today, with the following five questions:

1. Are brands more powerful than governments?
– Barcelona Forum, 2004

2. Why do we consider some lives to be worth more than others?
– Nicola Brown, 49, Devon, UK

3. How can we stop gang-violence in the inner cities and motivate young people to place importance on education instead of killing each other?
– Stephanie Allen, 53, Santa Monica, California, USA

4. Whose responsibility is it to manage the world’s resources?
– Barbara Mark, 54, San Francisco, USA

5. What concrete steps can we take to make sure that everyone has a decent education and that people, wherever they are born, have greater opportunity to contribute to the world?
– Bill Joy, California, USA

We look forward to all your answers. For further daily questions over the next two weeks, follow the Dropping Knowledge profile.

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

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“In which areas of life, if any, do women outperform men?”

– Denise Robertson

The Yahoo! Answers Challenge continues this week with agony aunt Denise Robertson asking a question in the featured category Business & Finance. Denise Robertson is known to millions as the agony aunt from ITV’s This Morning programme and has appeared on television for over twenty years, so she’s more than qualified to raise the issue of gender issues in the workplace with her question: ‘in which areas of life, if any, do women outperform men?’

The question is pertinent because, in era where women have long since gained legal workplace equality with men, they still under-perform in terms of mean salaries and senior management opportunities. This issue was addressed by TK in the Business & Finance category, asking: ‘what do women managers need to know to be successful and compete on the same level as men?’

The Business & Finance category is a wealth of useful information, divided into subcategories such as Careers & Employment, Personal Finance and Renting & Real Estate, all of which are rich in information and useful knowledge. Zee99 asks a question a great deal of would-be home owners are wondering: ‘why are house prices still going up in the UK?’ Smiley Face Lady wonders pertinently: ‘what’s an informal interview like?’ Are job interviews ever truly ‘informal?’

Denise Robertson will be back next week to chose the best answer - the Answers team are looking forward to all your thoughts and insights

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

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Avatars are one of the most debated topics on Yahoo! Answers, with many of you asking “What are avatars?” and “How do I create my own?” In short, an avatar is the virtual character you can find next to many of the questions and answers found on Yahoo! Answers. It helps give other people a better idea of what you are about, and you can easily create one in a few simple steps.

If you don’t already have an avatar, you can get started directly from the Yahoo! Answers home page. Just click on “My Q&A” which will take you to your Profile. Then select “Edit my Info” and you will see a link to “Get my Yahoo! Avatar now!” From this page, you can choose from a great selection of faces, hairstyles, apparel, accessories and backgrounds to create a new avatar.

You can then not only share your avatar with everyone on Yahoo! Answers, but also on a variety of other Yahoo! services, such as Messenger and 360°. Moreover, you can download your virtual character onto your mobile phone, send it to your friends as a postcard, or export it to your blog.

To find out more about Yahoo! Avatars from other users, check out some of the questions on Yahoo! Answers:

Why do avatars look like cartoon characters?

How do I change my Avatar on Yahoo! Answers?

Yahoo! Avatars are absolutely free, and in constant evolution: every Tuesday you can find new cool items for your avatar to try on. What’s more, when you create an avatar you particularly like, you can submit it to us, and with a bit of luck we might choose yours as our featured avatar of the week. So the only unanswered question we can think of now is: What are you waiting for?

–Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

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Yahoo! Answers is all about sharing content and knowledge, and the latest way of doing that is with the Yahoo! Answers API – now available on the Yahoo! Developer Network. For anyone scratching their heads, the Answers API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of tools we created to help you build applications that use Yahoo! Answers content.

A few months ago, we created a Flash Answers badge so that you could show off your questions and answers on your own website or blog. Now you can use the new Answers API to create your own badge, or build a custom Answers application designed specifically to show off your Answers prowess.

Using this API, you can access Answers content by user, search keyword, or category. These API’s are almost identical to what Yahoo! properties use, and we hope that you’ll think of new and interesting ways to view and use the content on Yahoo! Answers. We’ve also set up a Yahoo! Group for you to get tips, share ideas, and even brag about your applications.

With our latest update to the API, we have added a bunch of new fields and filters, allowing you to refine queries by question and answer, sort by date and relevance, filter by date range and region, and much more. For example, you can now query Answers using the same advanced search criteria we have today and return only results from one specific region.

We’ve used this API to build Messenger plug-ins, flash badges, and other Answers integrations around the Yahoo! network. We know that Yamsters have a lot of great ideas, and this new set of API’s is another way of giving the Answers community an opportunity to create innovative uses of Answers content. Needless to say, the best applications will be featured on our blog and in the Yahoo! Gallery, so let us know what you come up with!

Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

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