Quora really is fascinating

This thread caught my eye:

On the same page, we've got a well-known VC, the head of UberSocial (formerly called UberTwitter) and Twitter's Communications director discussing the news about Twitter blocking UberSocial's apps from accessing its API.

Where formerly such discussion would have taken place in fragmented parts of the internet, notably through blogs (and to a certain extent it has), we can see the story unfolding in front of our eyes on Quora, which somehow serves as a neutral discussion forum. The inclusion of Quora answers in the Techmeme stream makes them even more prominent and better distributed.

All this is amazing. Twitter and blogs had removed a lot of news intermediation, but one still had to go from pundits to individual tweets to bloggers to get a full picture. Here we've got an example of the full picture creating itself in one central location. I guess Quora can now officially be seen as the future of the future of news :-)

UPDATE
The topic of online Q&A is heating up lately:

Conrey is for Closers: When to Risk?

This is something I need to work on...

Seriously, stop stalling.

Do The Risky Stuff First

Have the hard conversations early in the week. Make the cold calls early (10 before 10?). Send that proposal on Monday. Put your neck out there as early as you can. That gives you as much time as possible to react and recover from how they turn out. It answers those lingering questions that are pulling on the back of your mind.

Best of all, it gives you instant feedback. The sooner you ask, the sooner you get an answer. The sooner you get things signed up or off your list.

Article: The Danger of Crocodile Sales | Both Sides of the Table

This article is great as well:

The Danger of Crocodile Sales | Both Sides of the Table
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/02/03/the-danger-of-crocodile-sales/

1. YOU Selling – My wise old friend & mentor, Ameet Shah, once told me after a meeting we had with clients (when I worked at Accenture), “there are two ways to run a meeting: asking or telling.  You’re a persuasive guy but be careful not to always be telling people the answer.  Nobody likes that.  You learn much more about how other people think when you’re asking.  And you get to better results.”

I try to do that as much as I can during meetings, though it's not always that easy to build rapport with certain potential customers. Clearly, "presentation mode" is way less effective than "discussion mode".

(via Instapaper)

Free Software, Paid Support by Fred Wilson

In keeping with my posting frenzy of the afternoon, an article from Fred Wilson on the topic of Free Software:

If you dissect the model, you'll see that the one time effort of building something is something many software creators are willing to do for free. But the ongoing time and effort of supporting and maintaining the software is not something that can be done for free.

This closely matches the model we're following at XWiki. He end his article with this quote, which I found funny:

But it does mean that the free model is very powerful and should be considered by anyone who like to create things but does not like to deal with hard work of maintaining and supporting the work. It is the model behind this blog in fact. You get the content for free. Anything else, you have to pay for with equity in your company.

From: "Free Software, Paid Support" at: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/free-software-paid-support.html