Yahoo!7 Answers Australia

Answers is constantly being updated to make it a better experience for our users. Many improvements have come from feedback from Answerers themselves, so make sure to leave a comment via this blog or on the forum if you see any problems or areas you would like enhanced.

There are a couple of recent changes which you should be aware of. Every country now has its own points Leaderboard, so you are able to see the power Answerers from Australia and New Zealand as well as the global points leaders. You can access the Australian Leaderboards from the My Q&A page.

The point leaders can now be viewed in either an overall or weekly standings format. While the overall standings will probably not change too frequently, the weekly standings will offer a better idea of how Answerers stack up based on weekly performance. Even a Level 1 user could potentially find themselves at the top of the board on any given week!

Another important change is that we’ve brought back a text link for Report Abuse, for both questions and answers. You can still report abuse through the action bar, but quality content is very important for Answers so we wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to show us any abusive or otherwise inappropriate content.

And finally, it’s time to say farewell as this is my last day here at Yahoo!7

Avatars are one of the most discussed topics on Yahoo!7 Answers, with many of you asking What are avatars? and How do I create my own? In short, an avatar is the virtual character you can find next to many of the questions and answers found on Answers. It helps give other people a better idea of what you are about, and you can easily create one in a few simple steps.

If you don’t already have an avatar, you can get started directly from the Yahoo!7 Answers home page. Just select “My Q&A”, which will take you to your profile. Then select “Edit my Info” and you will see a link to “Get my Yahoo! Avatar now!” From this page, you can choose from a great selection of faces, hairstyles, apparel, accessories and backgrounds to create a new avatar.

You can then not only share your avatar with everyone on Yahoo!7 Answers, but on a variety of other Yahoo!7 services, such as Messenger and 360°. Moreover, you can also download your avatar onto your mobile phone, send it to your friends as a postcard or export it to your blog.

To find out more about Yahoo!7 Avatars from other users, check out some of the questions on Answers:

Why do avatars look like cartoon characters?
How do I change my avatar?

Yahoo! Avatars are absolutely free, and in constant evolution: every Tuesday you can find new cool items for your avatar to try on. So the only unanswered question we can think of now is … what are you waiting for?

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

Having travelled around Australia, the Middle East, the US, South America, the UK and Europe, I have tasted some great food! From dirt cheap to costing a month’s salary, I have tried it all. One of the many things I love about Sydney is that it has virtually every kind of food you can think of.

With rising interest rates and fuel prices it is getting more difficult to rationalise spending a lot on taking someone out to a restaurant for a date, so 2DayFM‘s  The Labrat (104.1 FM) has put it out to you all – What is the best ‘el cheapo’ restaurant for a date in Sydney and why is it so good?

I can’t wait to read all the answers and look forward to finding out which answer he picks as best! Let us know what you think…

Alana

TGIF!

Well, the weather’s shaping up to be absolutely brilliant tomorrow - I just love living in Sydney when the sun shines! People just seem to be more happy and cheerful, the days seems to last longer and you can spend your weekends getting out and about in this great city, really enjoying yourself and having loads of  fun.

So what am I going to do this weekend? Well, I haven’t quite decided yet but there’s plenty of crazy ideas on my list of possibilities. Maybe I’ll paint my entire body with red and white paint and head down to Telstra Stadium to support our brilliant Sydney Swans in their finals clash against Fremantle?

Hitting the shops for some retail therapy might be a good way to spend my Saturday too – and if it gets too hot, maybe I’ll just strip down to my bikini and take a refreshing, but risque dip in the Martin Place fountain!

But shopping sounds like hard work when the weather’s so good – and I have had a busy week – so maybe I’ll just spend the entire weekend soaking up the sun at Freshwater or Manly beach or just floating around in a swimming pool somewhere, sunglasses on, a cool cocktail in one hand and my mp3 player in the other.

Today’s questions has got to be….What are your plans for having crazy fun in Sydney this weekend?  We want to know – the crazier the better!!

 Alana

Yahoo!7 Answers is all about sharing content and knowledge, and the latest way of doing that is with the Yahoo! Answers API — now available on the Yahoo! Developer Network. For anyone scratching their heads, the Answers API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of tools we created to help you build applications that use Yahoo!7 Answers content.

A little while ago, we created a flash Answers badge so Answerers could show off their questions and answers. Now you can use the new Yahoo! Answers API to create your own badge, or build a custom Answers application designed specifically to show off your Answers prowess.

Using this API, you can access Answers content by user, search keyword or category. These APIs are almost identical to what Yahoo! properties use, and we hope you’ll think of new and interesting ways to view and use the content on Yahoo!7 Answers. We’ve also set up a Yahoo! Group for you to get tips, share ideas and even brag about your applications.

The API has a bunch of fields and filters, allowing you to refine queries by question and answer, sort by date and relevance, filter by date range and region, and much more. For example, you can query Answers using the same advanced search criteria we have today and return only results from one specific region.

We’ve used this API to build Messenger plug-ins, flash badges, and other Answers integrations around the global Yahoo! network. We know that Answerers have a lot of great ideas, and this new set of APIs is another way of giving the Answers community an opportunity to create innovative uses of Answers content. Needless to say, the best applications will be featured on our blog and in the Yahoo!7 Gallery, so let us know what you come up with!

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

The Yahoo!7 office is a really fun place to work, but today I was entertained more than usual! The way my colleagues were talking  was like being on the set of a pirate movie! After being told that today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, I did a bit of investigating to see what it was all about.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is a parodic holiday invented in 1995 by two Americans, John Baur (‘Ol’ Chum Bucket’) and Mark Summers (‘Cap’n Slappy’), who proclaimed September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like pirates. For example, instead of ‘hello,’ an observer of this holiday would greet his mates with ‘Ahoy, me hearty!’

At first an inside joke between two friends, the holiday gained exposure when Baur and Summers sent a letter about their invented holiday to the American syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry in 2002. Barry liked the idea and promoted the day. There have been reports that this holiday was being celebrated in the New Zealand town of Wainuiomata at least as early as 2000, after local media reported the existence of Talk Like A Pirate Day. Growing media coverage of the holiday after Dave Barry’s column has ensured that this event is now celebrated internationally.

1. Original Talk Like a Pirate Day site
2. Australian Talk Like a Pirate Day site who choose to celebrate on Saturday 23rd Sept, 2006
3. Answers on when to celebrate this year
4. Pictures of people celebrating on Flickr
5. A free ringtone, fit for a pirate, and another few here, here and here
6. The Talk Like a Pirate Day song and lyrics
7. A great video on how to talk like a pirate

..and my favourite Talk Like a Pirate Day project has to be Jono’s Answers Pirate Day enhancement. Check it out!

Alaaarrrrrna

We’re happy to report that it’s time for another product release, which means new features and enhancements for Answers. Our team’s top priority is to improve content quality, and we have added some tools in this release as the next step in helping us achieve our goals.

What’s new?

Answers Sorted by Ratings: We know you’ve been spending time rating answers, but wouldn’t it be useful if you could sort answers by their rating? Well, now you can. The Answers team heard your feedback about being able to use ratings to filter content in the product, and now finding the highest rated answers is quick and easy – thanks to your suggestions. We like giving tools to the community that enable users to directly influence content quality, and we will continue to expand features like ratings in upcoming releases in an effort to better your experience on Answers.

Avatar Rollover: You’re probably tired of clicking through to a separate page to learn more about a user’s activity on Answers. Now, rolling your mouse over any member’s avatar image on question and answer pages will let you see some basic information about the user, including the user’s level and number of Best Answers. We will be expanding this feature in upcoming releases with the goal of allowing you to easily determine whether someone is a positive contributor to the community. This enhancement is a first step, so please let us know what you think.

Additional Email Preference: If you want to stop receiving answer emails on a question you asked, you can now do so by selecting “Stop emailing me new answers” from the Edit button on the Action Bar. Similarly, if you decide you want to turn them back on, select “Email me new answers.”

Points for Best Answer: As you know, we removed points for having your Best Answer rated in the last release because we were concerned about abuse of the ratings system. Based on your feedback, we decided to reinstitute points for getting “thumbs-up” ratings on Best Answers since we believe that rewarding people for great answers and great content is extremely important. From now on, you will get a point for every “thumbs-up” that you receive on your Best Answer – up to 50 points maximum. This means that every one of your answers that gets chosen as a Best Answer could be potentially worth a total of 62 points.

Ok, it’s time for the Answers team to get back to working on the next round of product features aimed at improving the content quality of the system. Please continue to let us know what you think and leave us a comment, either on this blog or the Answers forum.

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

Five years ago, today, events in the United States changed life for many people all around the world. I remember a breaking news story cut through an episode of The West Wing, earily about stopping a terrorist act. At first I didn’t know if it was part of the storyline, but I very quickly found out it wasn’t. Dramatic pictures were beamed live to our televisions of a frightening day in history.

In Australia, the events on September 11, 2001 started debate that still continues to this day – in the media, parliaments, schools, universities, families, in the street, online message boards and there have been many questions on Yahoo!7 Answers. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the events that took place as well as the actions governments took afterwards. As we still try to come to terms with this tragedy, share your thoughts with the rest of the world – How did 9/11 affect you?

History is different for everyone as we experience it through our own world-views, but if we can learn anything 5 years on, let it be that increasing communication and sharing our thoughts is a big step towards living in peace. 

Today, on September 11, 2006, the Yahoo!7 Answers Team respectfully remembers all those who lost their life in the tragic events in the Unites States, five years ago.

Alana

Professor Stephen Hawking recently asked about how mankind can survive the next 100 years.