Turkey day trivia ... courtesy of Answers.com

This week’s edition is being brought to you a couple of days early because of the Thanksgiving weekend. Speaking of which, do you know what the most popular pastime is the night before Thanksgiving? Nope, it’s not preparing the stuffing or fowl for the next day’s festivities. It’s drinking!

In the Niagara Gazette, Kevin Purdy sources Answers.com which states that Thanksgiving eve is one of the busiest nights out in the northeastern United States for drinking and socializing. Hope this doesn’t effect anyone here on turkey day if they do participate in the, um, tradition.

This week, Answers.com made an appearance in a major newspaper, albeit the mention was a bit dubious. Bruce Horovitz in USA Today paints an ugly picture of marketers scheming and cheating to get in front of children for the holiday season. Out of the six dodgy strategies marketers use, he names one as “Bus Radio” (calling it a strategy seems like a stretch). Who would participate in this wretched scheme? Well, Bus Radio founder Michael Yanoff wouldn’t name any of their advertisers, except for Answers.com. (Ironically, I felt “thrown under the bus” when I saw us mentioned). Now, here is where you can interpret the story in one of two ways. Either readers will see us as guilty by association (even though we don’t sell toys) or they will see that Bus Radio mentioned our name because we are an altruistic company that is above reproach.

The big news for the company, however, was the partnership with Yahoo! Answers. The story was picked up on the wires and then written and blogged about across the mediascape. A sampling of some of these mentions are below:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061121-093849

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4023

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/11/21/yahoo-partners-with-answers-com/

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2061901,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

Wikipedia is an authoritative source ... way or no way?

Everyone has their own opinion, and nowhere is that more evident than in the press. Exhibit A:

Some articles hype Answers.com as better than Wikipedia, and some don’t. Tessa Wegert writing for ClickZ started her article by saying, “If your idea of a comprehensive research site is Wikipedia, you might want to familiarize yourself with Answers.com.” (The article also gives props to blufr and challenges marketers to use it in a creative way for their campaigns.) Bambi Francisco, however, points out that while Wikipedia updated Milton Friedman’s biography on the day of his death, Answers.com did not.

There were some late-to-the-party articles also floating around this week. Last week’s acquisition of FAQ Farm was mentioned in WriteNews and the month old deal with The New York Times appeared in RedOrbit – check out their tagline, “breaking news.”

In the blog world this week a researcher did some research on research sites and named Answers.com as a “worthy tool.” We got a similar mention as a “neat” reference tool from Alan Le.

Blufr

Did you know that blufr is ranked #2 for Most Popular Web 2.0 Apps? It is and blogger hotgirlswearsunglasses finds no shame in mentioning that she wastes the company’s time by playing the addictive trivia game. Another fan believes blufr is the answer to conversation lulls and Phyllis also gave blufr a shout out this week as her favorite site.