I hadn’t seen Wondir before (perhaps because yesterday was the Official Launch). This service uses a java backend to run a Q&A service. Netizens can register and answer questions or just ask questions as a guest. There seems to be some sort of karma-type system to deal with who is answering the most questions and or giving the highest quality type answers. Mitch Ratcliffe explains:

Unlike About.com, for example, which gathered experts under contract, Wondir will distribute compensation (initially just good feelings and the pride of answering questions well) to all comers; I think that’s a vastly superior approach for experts, who can accrue revenue based on time they contribute once there is a clear economic model…

So are they going to do some sort of micropayment per quality question sort of like epinions is doing with articles? I’m curious how this is setup. Please keep in mind that the comments which follow are very early, very rough thoughts, that aren’t the result of a full fledged review or anything:

- the java interface moves a bit sluggish for my liking. This is nothing new, it seems like almost every java program with any sort of significance moves slowly. Ok, maybe it’s just my lowend lousy machines. That’s what I’ve been told before.
- How do you find questions you’ve just answered? The only way I could locate the question I just answered was by clicking on “Question board” and then right mouse clicking and copying the link to the question from there.
- once signed up I answered this question: “how to get targeted traffic?” from WTGuest7008407 with the following:

1) Start a weblog on your domain and write informative, non-spammy articles on the subject.
2) In those relative articles/entries be sure to ping the various RPC2 services (see pingomatic.com)
3) relevantly tag your entries using del.icio.us and other free tag services.
4) If it’s a mainstream interest then use Google Adwords to advertise for contextual keywords on other websites. On your own site use Adsense to see what types of things Google is contextually advertising for you.
5) check out free tools like the Yahoo API (developer.yahoo.net) and text extraction engine specifically to help understand what types of keywords a machine might see on your page(s) and act accordingly.
6) make sure your RSS feed(s) are visible and use the code for auto detection of the main RSS in the HEAD of your HTML pages
7) use relevant meta tags and description for each page.
Use relevant ALT tags in images, but do not spam keywords
9) follow the Google Webmaster guidelines as well as other search engine guidelines.
10) sign up for other relevant websites (including blogs, messageboards, etc) and be sure to put your site URL in your public profile.

Those were a few mostly blog-related ideas off the top of my head. I didn’t mention some of the other things that we’ve used like blogexplosion. Might have been a really good place to mention that. On the other hand some people freak out when they see affiliate links and totally discount any advice given, so I’m glad I left that out.

- Why are they using frames?! Frames are like 1995 thinking. I like to see the URLs I’m visiting, but maybe that’s just me. Anybody else reading despise frames more than I?
- The stock ticker idea for recent questions is cool, but again, kind of slow.
- The MyWondir area has a “Payment/Tips ($$$) information” but it’s not linked (would be nice to have a question mark there to define this purpose)
- The Help section says that registered users “can receive tips ($$$) from satisfied users.”
- I noticed that they have a rating system similar to epinions: “not helpful, somewhat helpful, helpful, very helpful”
- Where are the RSS feeds? John Battelle spoke to the founder of Wondir, Matt Koll, and Mr. Koll hinted that RSS news will be coming from Wondir “soon.”
- No Wondir blog? Maybe this should be my first question to ask the system. Not every site necessarily should have a blog, but a Wondir blog would be a good place to get information and updates on Wondir. They do have a What’s New page, so it might fit good there.

Summary: overall site response time and the use of frames would likely drive me away from using this site very much, but it’s a promising attempt, inspired somewhat it seems by the epinions model and apply it to a Q & A community. Google Answers, anybody?

• Wondir-ing how to respond to feedback?
• Yahoo Answers easier than asking the questions
• Humans For Sale calculates your value as a human being
• Artificial Intelligence search “working beta” too dumb to find any search results, but it has a patent pending?
• SEO and Affiliate Marketing Introduction Who is TanyaMartin anyway?
• Paying, er, taking advantage of Citizen Journalists