Expert help sites

A year ago I wrote about expert help sites. It’s time to take another look:

• Allexperts.com, the oldest and largest free Q&A service on the Internet. Ratings help you find the right expert.

• Askearth, a site created “so that people could be paid to give good-quality, in-depth answers to the really tough questions about life, business, technology and hundreds of other subjects.” Post a question and indicate how much you’re willing to pay for the answer. Then the service’s experts send you their answers.

• The Abuzz knowledge network from the NY Times Digital. 60% of questions are answered in 4 hours and only 10% are never answered. One reviewer said they have the smartest experts and most active community.

• Google Answers: Google’s expert site originally leveraged its wide user base but now relies on 500 paid experts.

• Keen.com: SF site offers advice over the phone for a fee.

• Expertcentral.com uses thousands of volunteer experts.

• Quickcomputerhelp.com and GeekHelp are different brands of the same service. Two free minutes and $2.79/minute after that. Call (toll-free) 888-733-2463. No membership needed, unlike Speak With a Geek, which requires a monthly or yearly membership.

Looks like many other expert sites have imploded or left the consumer end of the business. Here’s a roll call of sites that were once on my list and now appear to be out of commission: Askme.com has turned into a company that manages employee knowledge networks; Expertcity.com has gone corporate; Yahoo Advice replaced Yahoo Experts, then was farmed out to Liveadvice, which itself has gone belly up and now forwards visitors to Keen.com; Sevant.com made computer house calls in the SF Bay Area; Aveo.com was a guide to explaining error messages, and more; Exp.com was an experts site out of Menlo Park, Calif.; Ask-a-tech.org was a site that let users submit questions and wait for responses from online experts; Epeople.com has gone corporate; Inforocket.com went kaput and forwards visitors to Keen.com.

One reason for the collapse of most expert-help sites may be the proliferation of weblogs. I can think of a dozen times where I’ve posted a query on my blog and received an answer without having to fork over any dough on the expert advice sites.

Don’t know if readers have used any of the above sites, but if so and you’d like to share your experience, post it here.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.