Keen-eyed readers will have noted that I asked a question on LinkedIn recently about email signatures (.sig), got lots of great answers from the likes of Heidi Cool, Jo Brodie and Ari Herzog. Incidentally, I redid my .sig (and probably will do so again) so that it is very bare – just name and main web address).

Anyway, LinkedIn Answers is a very useful place to start for informed and informative Q&A sessions online, much more professional and sensible than Yahoo Answers, of course. But the ensuing discussion about my post threw up a couple of alternatives Quora.com and Fluther.com.

Quora is “A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it,” which sounds like a Wiki Q&A to me, but certainly worth a look. It has social connection tools to hook up your contacts, Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and in one sense is a formalised Twitter for Q&As. Fluther combines serious and not so serious by having a general Q&A section with strict guidelines that focuses on helping people get the answers they need, while the relaxed guidelines of the social section encourage users to express their opinions and flex their sense of humor. Social works best when you want to learn about people. A quick glance at Fluther would suggest it’s more akin to Yahoo Answers in terms of triviality and stupidity than LinkedIn Q&A, I’m afraid.

Other Q&A sites include Aardvark (http://vark.com/) which apparently “taps the knowledge of the people in your network”, ask a question and the service will find someone to answer it. There’s also BlurtIt, which despite its name seems quite serious and Amazon’s Askville, AnswerBag and AOL Answers (formerly Yedda).

Google Answers and Microsoft QnA are now defunct (Google as of 2006! and QnA as of 2009! How time flies), no more questions being taken but there is an archive.

There have been many others, way back in the 90s there were community sites where one earned “points” and sometimes even money for answering questions. Do you use a better Q&A site than those listed above?