Fortunately there are sites out there that can not only  be used to find peoples thoughts and opinions about a particular topic but will also will help in finding experts in various fields. Herein find some best sites where you can ask questions and get answers from real people online.

Answerbag

You can find answers to various questions from different categories on Answerbag You may ask questions on any topic but will need to register to do so. You can also browse through questions in selected categories of your choice and read all the questions and answers posted by other people.

Yahoo! Answers

Probably the most popular community Q&A powered site with millions of users and thousands of questions asked and answered every day. All the questions are categorized in such a way that you can easily search for a related question in a category or place you question in a relevant category. Answers are rated by visitors and the best rated answer will be displayed as the best answer for a question.

You need to register with the site in order to ask or answer the questions. To make the users participate actively, it has a points system. When you ask a question you’ll spend points and when you answer the questions you’ll earn them. Based on the points earned, the user level will be defined.

Blurt it

This is another site where you can ask questions and answer them without  registration. You can also browse through questions in various categories and browse through the Q&A’s posted by other people.

You can explore answers across various topics and categories and get opinions from various people across the world on a selected knowledge area.

Anybody Out There

AnybodyOutThere is an interesting concept and platform that provides instant and relevant responses to your thoughts and questions by connecting you to people the people who should be able to help.

AnybodyOutThere lets you post the general topic of your question then goes to work finding the best person to answer your question based on how they’ve helped others before.

WikiAnswers

Wiki answers have a huge database of questions and answers and they are arranged in about 5,372 categories for easy reference. On the homepage you can post questions and also see new questions and new answers for the questions asked.

You can also answer to questions asked by other people and most of the answers are moderated and  the best and relevant answers will be displayed. Reference library will help you get the reference you needed on a select topic.

You can browse through un-answered questions to answer them or browse through the answered questions and add your answer to a question. If you are registered with the site, you will get email notifications whenever your question is answered.

FunAdvice

FunAdvice integrates questions, answers and photos in a unique experience that gives people a fun way to ask for advice, share information, and make friends. Despite the site looking a bit plain, the site is in fact on the fastest growing Q&A sites out there gaining a great deal of traction over recent months.

Askville

This website is powered by Amazon. The most interesting part of the site is, when you ask a question all the related questions will be displayed for you to easily find the answer instantly. If the question you have asked is unique then, you can post your question on the site to get it answered by  people. from across the world. When your question gets answered, you will get an email notification so that you can easily go through the answers.

To encourage user participation, it will issue gold points unlike yahoo. You can earn gold points when you have asked or answered a question. You can  comment on answers and also give a compliment to questions and answers.

Ask Me Help Desk

You need to register with this site and create an account for free in order to ask and answer questions.  When your question gets answered by others you will get an email notification about the answer. The key feature of this site is that, you can also get paid for providing answers to questions.

You can also become expert on this site by answering more questions so that you can build reputation. It also allows you to communicate with other members privately to exchange knowledge with others.

Answer Bank

On this site you can get answers to questions related to a wide variety of topics including music, law, sesonal, jobs, family etc.,

A lot of questions on the AnswerBank are topical, relating to what is going on in the news or in the world of entertainment and sport. You can ask as many questions as your imagination can provide.

AskDeb

You can ask questions about any topic on this site and get answers, opinions  and advice from  experts and real people.

You can ask questions related to daily and professional life.  This is also a blogging site where in you can find articles about various topics and information about many things.

Able2Know

In this site you can ask a question and also start a discussion on a topic  to  get answers and opinions from various people.

You can also provide answers to un-answered questions and exchange knowledge with others. Help others to get answers and in turn you will get help from others on your questions.

Mahalo Answers

This is one another up and coming community powered question . Most of  the data present on the site is submitted by users. It will also check for quality of answers and users can also vote for their favorites.  The most voted answer will be picked as the best answer for the question.

Answerly

Answerly lets you search across a scope of Q&A sites using a custom Google search.

AardVark

Aardvark uses an entirely new method to get answers to your questions.   Described as Yahoo Answers meets Twitter, Aardvark primarily uses email and IM to send and receive answers to questions.

The site uses your network of friends and their friends as  a resource, and when  a question is posted, it will look for the most appropriate person among them to answer it.

Twitter

Twitter in its own right, is another very good platform to get answers and opinions from people. Similar to Aardvark in some respects, but where it does fall short is that you’re limited by the number of people who follow you. Thanks to the retweet however, there’s always a good chance someone will be kind enough to share it with their followers. There are a number of services that use the Twitter API to create their own Q&A service, examples include:  IKnowTweet, ToAnswer, TwitQA, .

Friendfeed

Recently acquired Friendfeed is another fantastic way to find answers to your questions. Thanks to a feature called “groups” which lets users create groups for discussion around a particular topics, you’ll find if your question is about a particular subject area – there’s bound to be someone who can help.

To find a group, use the search tools on the site. You have to join the respective group to post your question and you can get answers from people. in real time.

Srikanth writes on Tech Inspiration blog about tips, gadgets, and technology.

These days 20+ parallel sessions on a browser are quite common. The browser is more of an operating system than a data display application. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information.

But, looking at the brighter side, this solves the problem of having multiple browser application windows which usually clutter the task bar. However, having tabs across the top of the application window doesn’t make that much sense, especially as the number of open pages increases.

The Question

Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?

To participate in the design challenge you need to create a mockup of your proposed solution. A mockup can be anything from a wireframe, a drawing or a polished graphic. You also need to create a video explaining your idea(s), presenting the mockup and showing how your idea works.

To get you started, to inspire your thinking and to give you a faster insight, check out this presentation on visualizing browser tabs by TabViz

To check out further details on the design challenge click here.

We hope you like it!

You might also want to check out  Twitter in Plain English.

[ Thanks Nithin ]

Here we go with this week’s Interestingness!

• Compress Your Images To The Last Bytes With Smush It from MakeUseOf
• Hands-on with IE 8: A giant step for Microsoft from The Download Blog
• Can Digg keep up with Facebook? from ReadWriteWeb
• 10 Principles For Readable Web Typography from Smashing Magazine
• 5 Ways to Save Money on Conferences and Events from Mashable

Let us know your views about this  segment and feel free to share links to interesting articles you have come across in the comments. Just make sure it has interestingness!

[ Photo Credit ]

If you missed out last week, here is an experimental segment, we call it the Interestingness!. Where in, we’ll cover intriguing articles from across the web which are ‘Hot wire’ and ‘Eye Catchers’.

Here we go with this week’s Interestingness!

• The 2009 List Of Tech Billionaires And How Much They Lost
  from TechCrunch
• Boost Your Skills and Reputation During Recession Slack-Time from LifeHacker
• 16 great music Add-ons for Firefox from Mashable
• 13 Most Desirable Collection Of Free Resources For Every Designer from Smashing Apps
• New iPhone OS due on March 17th at an Apple Event. What’s on Your Wish List? from The Next Web
• GrandCentral Returns as Google Voice from ReadWriteWeb

Let us know your views about this  segment and feel free to share links to interesting articles you have come across in the comments. Just make sure it has interestingness!

[ Photo Credit ]

At The Next Web, we have an ongoing quest to make your digital life easier and more interesting by updating you regularly with startup reviews, useful software, and innovative internet tools and services.

Here is an experimental segment, we call it the Interestingness!. Here, we’ll cover intriguing articles from across the web which are ‘Hot wire’ and ‘Eye Catchers’.

Here we go with Interestingness!

• What An Antitrust Case Against Google Might Look Like from TechCrunch
• The Idiot’s Ultimate Guide To Building Your Own Computer from Make Use Of
• iPhone and iPods are Banned at the Bill Gates Household from The Next Web
  
• Flickr fears Facebook eating its cake, opens video sharing to gain popularity from StartupMeme
• Look thin and slim in your photographs instantly from Digital Inspiration
• Showcase of beautiful shadow photography from Smashing Magazine

Let us know your views about this new segment and feel free to share links to interesting articles you have come across in the comments. Just make sure it has interestingness!

[Photo Credit]

There are so many Add-ons that are currently available for Firefox for easing your way through social networking, web development, media management, alerts and security that the mind boggles.

Here we present a couple of Firefox Add-ons, which we believe are key to making your browsing experience better.

All-in-One Sidebar

It opens dialog windows such as Downloads, History, Extensions and Bookmarks in the sidebar. You can even view source or websites in the sidebar. Each sidebar panel is also accessible by a shortcut key so that you can quickly pop out the sidebar with the right key combination.

For instance,

• F4 – To open or close the sidebar.
• Ctrl+Shift+F4 – To open or close the options dialog.

You can set its orientation to left or right, set the minimum, default and maximum width based on your needs with ease. It also includes a slide-out button and a toolbar which can be extensively customized.

The All-In-One Sidebar Firefox extension is available for download from the Firefox Add-ons site.

UrlbarExt

It extends the Location Bar in your browser with set of icons to:

• Create a Tiny URL (Shorten URL via tinyurl.com)
• Copy URL to clipboard
• Navigate through sequential URLs. This function / icon appears only when the add-on recognizes sequential URL’s. You need to hold the icon to navigate the next URL in the sequence.
• Tag current pages and browse them later using the ‘Recent Tags’ menu.
• Go up one level or directly to the root of the current site (double click).
• Search the current site using Google.
• (Very Suitable for Work!) Surf anonymously using online proxy servers and Unblock filtered websites.

You can always show/hide any icon you don’t need using the settings dialog. UrlbarExt Firefox Add-on is available for download here.

Do let us know about your favorite Add-on(s) in the comments.

Soundzit is a new music service developed with the Youtube API that provides access to over 300 million songs where in you can search, listen and embed music online for free and without any registration. The users can also purchase music on iTunes and listen to high quality songs through a link on all music listing.

Below is a sample embedded player

Let us know your views about this music search engine in comments.

Concrete5 is a framework built in PHP for developing content based websites. It’s got a flexible concrete architecture which is simple and easy to use. You can manage content and media with ease without having to spend much time on HTML. Pages can be tagged and categorized for easy navigation through the website. The built in toolbar lets you edit pages as you navigate with a click.

The user accounts can be effectively managed with hierarchy of user levels. Additional functionality can be added on the site with the help of built in blocks like form wizard, slide show, survey, RSS displayer, Auto-Nav etc. The dashboard displays the recent site activity along with the traffic statistics.

You can also have a free demo of concrete5 for 15 days here and the project framework source is available on SourceForge for free here.

What would it be like if screencasts were made of paper?

The screencast below explains one of the basic features in Google Maps: how to mark or annotate any place in the world. The most intriguing part of it is that, the entire screencast was made only using paper and scissors.

If you enjoyed it, do watch this Gmail screencast from Russia that was also created on paper.

[via labnol]