Helium.com : About, Yahoo Answers & Wikipedia All Rolled Into One
An alternative to the Q&A services and social media projects at Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, Live QnA & Answerbus.com, Helium hopes to be a knowledge oriented community which is not full of just hot air. Adding a dash of About.com and Consumer Reports to the Q&A field, Helium encourages consumers & users who are passionate about a topic to explore their interest by reading insight provided by others.
Consumers can also share their experiences by writing articles or suggesting new topics to the community. The web site even enables those who write to act as armchair critics, reviewing the work of others, ensuring quality by leveraging the power of peer-review.
Question, how do you motivate an army of product reviewers to get involved and contribute so much content to Helium without having the foundation of registered users that Yahoo or Microsoft have, or without the content creating work-from-home staffers found at Infosearch Media? Easy, incentivize them. Helium offers its knowledge base the chance to earn a share of revenue generated from the info they contribute:
From Helium:
Sure, Helium is an outlet for the writer in all of us, but it is also a place where you can earn not only the adoration of your peers, but money, too! We want you to be part of the success here. Helium shares a portion of revenue with you. Every article you write is an asset which can earn you revenue—into perpetuity. The better you write, the higher you rank, the more your reward.
“The potential for user-contributed content will go unrealized until that content can be organized for easy browsing and finding, said John Blossom, President of Shore Communications, a leading management consulting firm. “Helium has created a way to rank content that balances the opinions of authorities and the opinions of a user community. Community members compare one article to another to decide which is best, to drive quality to the top of a topic through a fair and democratic process.”
More from Helium :
Search engines, while helpful, force the user to review a list of links. Community sites such as Yahoo! Answers® do not offer the organization needed to make finding insight quick or easy, and reference sites such as Wikipedia® offer one homogenized viewpoint that is only achieved through contributors overwriting one another.
“Helium is different because it takes the chaos of user-contributed content and orders it with a trusted ranking system that dramatically improves the quality and accessibility of collective wisdom for the knowledge-seeker,” said Mark Ranalli, President and CEO of Helium. “At Helium, multiple quality responses to conversational subjects such as ‘Which Aruba resort is better?’, or ‘Tips for buying antique furniture’ are provided in rank order, making it simple to efficiently consider more than one perspective.”
So, who owns the content which users upload and create for Helium? Like its competitors in the social media fields, Helium does of course!
• You grant Helium, and its affiliates, a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, transferable, non-exclusive right and license to use, copy, modify, delete in its entirety, adapt, publish, translate, display, create derivative works from and/or sell and/or distribute content posted to Helium.
• Helium’s rights to the content do also imply rights to use, in any way, the materials for our own internal business purposes, and reproduction and distribution for the purpose of marketing and publicity for Helium.
• Helium disclaims any obligation to legally protect your works or your copyrights, and you acknowledge that we will have no liability, vicarious, contributory, or otherwise, for any infringement of any of your intellectual property rights.
• You acknowledge that we do not control other users’ actions, including but not limited to their use of your content. We will have no liability to you for any user’s violation of these terms and no responsibility to you to enforce these terms for your benefit.
• If your content includes one or more links to content hosted on servers other than ours, it will not be considered uploading or posting of content to the Helium site, and it is understood that we will have no right to use or distribute such content unless it is also uploaded or posted directly to the Helium site.
Last one gets me, does this mean that users cannot upload articles which link out? Possibly a spam or legal deterrent, but I’m wondering how much this will lead to users plagiarizing articles without proper link referrals to the original content creator.
