

Announcing O'Reilly Answers - coriander
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/11/announcing-oreilly-answers.html

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tseabrooks
I think this is clearly a response to StackOverflow. If I can get a lot of
high quality content on the sorts of things O'Reilly publishes books about in
a free online place (StackOverflow) why would I waste money on purchasing
their books?

Notice that they will be 'rewarding' contributions with points redeemable for
books. This site exists because O'Reilly is afraid StackOverflow will result
in a loss of sales of their books and they have no original idea on how to
combat the problem.

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chromatic
A good publisher has nothing to fear from Stack Overflow.

I suspect the site exists instead because the company wants to have a web site
with a lot of traffic but isn't willing to pay anyone to write things people
want to read. Thus their solution is to reuse material from books and convince
people to contribute original material in exchange for badges and coupons.

The company's launched quite a few experiments on the web, only to abandon
them a couple of months later. Perhaps this one will last longer than three
months; it appears they've actually put some money into it.

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telemachos
> _I suspect the site exists instead because the company wants to have a web
> site with a lot of traffic but isn't willing to pay anyone to write things
> people want to read. Thus their solution is to reuse material from books and
> convince people to contribute original material in exchange for badges and
> coupons._

And the material not reused from books (both some posts and most of the
answers so far, perhaps all of the answers so far) comes from various O'Reilly
employees who have a new responsibility: "seeding O'Reilly answers."

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telemachos
I'm not sure I can say how awful that site is.

To focus on one thing, nearly all of the current posts appear to be snippets
taken from their books, with prominently placed ads below. These are _not_
questions: they're just advertisements. (I also wonder if the authors were
asked about the use of their work in this way.) The posts that aren't by
authors are by editors or other O'Reilly employees. The thing is sheer
astroturfing, not a QA site.

It's sad to see a company that does something so well (their books are
generally excellent) so desperate to capture every market. They feel a bit
like Starbucks a few years ago.

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RyanMcGreal
> The thing is sheer astroturfing, not a QA site.

When reddit launched, nearly all the posts were by reddit devs or YC insiders.
Give it time to see if the model takes off among external users.

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telemachos
Nah, not buying it.

Were the reddit devs aware that they were making those posts? I'm guessing
yes, but I'm guessing that easily 50% of those "posters" over at O'Reilly
Overflow have no idea what they've been up to.

Were the reddit devs selling their books by posting? (Yes, I understand that
Reddit sells stuff, but the posts are not directly linked to selling what
they're posting about. That's what makes the O'Reilly site astroturfing.)

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rabble
It looks like it's not based on the actual stackoverflow code.

<http://builtwith.com/?http://answers.oreilly.com/>

Says, PHP / Rails. Where as Stackoverflow is ASP.MVC.

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mahmud
Why the investigation?

 _I'd like to acknowledge the projects that have proceeded Answers and
inspired us, such as SitePoint Forums (we distribute their books),
StackOverflow, Yahoo! Answers, Knol, and many others_

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indierockerboy
Soo.... their answer to the silos of information is yet another silo. Nice.

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icefox
What type of companies would O'Reilly be interested in acquiring?

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petercooper
I might be blind to it, but I don't recall hearing of any newsworthy O'Reilly
acquisitions well.. ever. Well, except Esther Dyson's Release newsletter.

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sleepingbot
Yet another SO clon.

