New York Times

Read on, publicists and fame-seekers!

Mr. Duhigg wrote:

1. Call me up and in a whispered, gravelly voice say something like "I have evidence that the President of the United States hired people to break into the campaign offices of the opposition party." Then, hang up really fast. (Note: must actually have evidence to get on the front page.)

2. Take all of your money out of the bank. Throw said money on the carpet. Take off all of your clothing and lie down on said carpet. Take a full body photo of yourself with your cell phone, and send it to me and/or a 22 year-old intern. (Note: must be member of Congress.)

3. Tell New Yorkers that, if they want to drink 12 gallons of soda in one sitting, they need to order it in three separate containers. Wait for predictable outrage from people who compare said proposal to "1984." (Note: must be mayor of New York.)

4. Get a huge tattoo that reads "The New York Times" across your chest. (Note: not likely to actually get you on the front page, but will definitely get you a free drink the next time we're in a bar together.)

5. Email me a brief synopsis of why whatever you want to get on the front page of The New York Times should be on the front page of The New York Times. If possible, include a description of why what you are describing is new and reflects a broad trend with important implications. Further, if possible, tailor said email to topics I have previously written about. I'm at duhigg@nytimes.com. (Note: not guaranteed to work - but you would be surprised how often great articles start this way. Really: we get emails all the time from people that become front page articles. We like getting well-written, interesting emails as much as the next person. Particularly from naked legislators.)

Very charming, but a word of warning about number 4: The writer/journalist/Internet personality The Fat Jew got New York magazine's logo tattooed on his chest and all he got was this Daily Intel post.

Answer: Start a question and answer service. 

NY and NJ based Q&A app Opinionaided has just raised $1 million from General Catalyst, SoftBank Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson along with angel investors Mark Wachen of DreamIt Ventures and Jonah Goodhart of Point Ventures Group.

As the app's title implies, its not looking for factual answers, just opinions. Users can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to questions in the style of Hot or Not.

As any TV film critic or Roman gladiator will tell you, thumbs up and thumbs down are really the only responses you need to answer life's most important questions. For example, in response to the question "What's the best way to cure pneumonia?" Opinionaided users have voted two thumbs up, one thumb down and zero helpful answers of any sort at all.

It's possible that this app could be useful for getting the internet's opinion of whether or not those new jeans make you look fat, but for anything beyond that, the wisdom of the crowd seems like it may end up squandered. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

The answers on Answers.com range from accurate to the patently ridiculous, drawing in more than 47 million unique visitors a month. "We're here to proudly proclaim that there is no such thing as a stupid answer," says the Answers.com blog. "Or is that a stupid question?"

Quora, the cool kid in the space, recently saw a surge in mainstream attention thanks to tech blogger Robert Scoble. GigaOm puts Quora's value at around $300 million based on investor interest. 

Meanwhile, New York's Stack Overflow has been crushing it, more than doubling in size during 2010 from seven million users to more than sixteen million.

Like Quora and Stack Overflow, Answers.com relies on its community of registered users to assess and improve the quality of its answers, which it matches with content from sources like Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary.

Here, in no particular order, are 13 of the questions and answers that earned Answers.com its nine-figure price tag. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

The Wall Street Journal just discovered Quora, however, and did not fall in love: "I found it uninviting, geeky and poorly explained," Katherine Boehret writes in the course of a lengthy review.

Conventional wisdom says that people prefer figuring new things out as they go over reading directions, which is why intuitive user design is so important. Ms. Boehret did not find Quora intuitive.

The site lacks instructions on how to use it; people just have to figure it out as they go. For example, a newcomer might not know that Quora answers can be voted up or down by seeing two tiny triangles that appear beside each answer. If I select the up triangle, this indicates I voted for that answer, and news of this vote is shared on the Quora home page of anyone who follows me. A number beside each answer indicates how many votes it has received so far. But unless you've used the site for a while, you wouldn't know any of this.

Unless you had ever used Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Yahoo Answers, that is!

Maybe we're just in a bubble here with others who spend more than eight hours a day on the Internet, but we know we can't believe everything we read on websites:

One thing to be wary of: There's nothing that qualifies the most popular answers as accurate, nor do people who write the most popular answers necessarily qualify as experts. This could lead to confusion or even danger, like medical questions that are answered incorrectly.

Sorry to riff on you, Ms. Boehret. It looks like you  did your homework for this article and tried really hard to use Quora. We just don't like it when you talk about our wife like that.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

This thread on the Q&A site Quora sparked a conversation this week about where entrepreneurs and investors like to hang out in the city. Investor Charlie O'Donnell of First Round Capital followed up with a Dinevore map of where to eat to meet VCs.

Turns out New York's startup scene is all about ready coffee, good food and a touch of class.

Here are ten of the most-oft cited restaurants, bars and mudholes where New York's tech scenesters go to kick back.

SLIDESHOW: Ten Spots Where New York's Entrepreneurs and Investors Hang Out >>

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Answer: Not at all. Q & A sites are a kind of social network and a solution to problems with the Google's decreasingly-useful search engine. It's a crowded space--Tech Observer has receivered press releases this week from Ask.com, ChaCha and Answers.com, the last of which is relaunching soon.

Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow, the popular Q & A site for programmers, had some insight in his interview on We Are NY Tech this morning.

Spolsky also created Stack Exchange, a network of Q & A communities built around specific topics, like photography, cooking, gaming.

Any topic for which there is a scholarly journal merits a Q & A site, he said, pegging that number at between 20,000 and 40,000. "You need a minimum number of participants studying the same thing (400-500) which is about the same number as it takes to sustain a journal," he said.

The Q & A site Quora recently exploded, spreading from the earliest early adopters and taking hold with secondary early adopters (crucial group!) after being reviewed by tech blogger Robert Scoble, who gushed its praises. Two weeks later, the hype is still going.

Quora's innovation was to make answers not crap by requiring users to authenticate their names with Twitter or Facebook and having editors police content.

Spolsky's sites, due to their niche appeal, also filter out most of the Internet's trolls.

And if this whole Q&A thing doesn't pan out, Spolsky has a backup plan. "There isn't a single espresso shop on the Upper West Side that knows how to steam milk for lattes properly. I think at Starbucks they just put their face in the milk and blow bubbles," he said.

"I would open a cafe called the No Laptop Cafe. Hipsters pretending to write novels while they mull for six hours over one cup of brewed coffee would be banned. Instead, we would have real newspapers and folk singers."

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Despite the fact that it's been trolled by tech journalists for almost a year, Quora's userbase had been growing slowly and quietly until it started to shoot up in the fall.

Uberblogger Robert Scoble finally tried Quora and wrote a rave review Sunday, and the site was apparently flooded with new users curious to see what all the fuss was about. Existing users noticed a bump in followers as well as a noticeable slowdown as Quora, which posts answers in real-time, struggled to keep up with the traffic.

Quora is unique because it updates in real time, is policed by administrators and tries to verify user identities.

Scoble compares it to blogging, but a more appropriate comparison might be Wikipedia. Quora is going after the questions that people type into Google, such as: Why did the Roman empire fall? Where is the best pizza in New York? What's going to happen to Delicious?

The collection of answers on Quora is edited by administrators and organized by users voting up or down on specific replies, forming a summary that could be a searcher's final destination.

If you're just getting started on Quora, check out our feature Ten Tech-Savvy New Yorkers You Should Follow On Quora.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Even ZocDoc, which Crain's named the best place to work in the New York area based on benefits and an employee satisfaction survey, is having trouble staffing. ZocDoc is looking for ten engineers, Nick Ganju, CTO of ZocDoc, told The Observer yesterday at a techie snowball fight in Madison Square Park.

Ganju gets one hire out of every 500 resumes, which means he needs to get thousands of applicants in order to fill the open slots. Which is why he was passing out business cards at a snowball fight.

On Quora, the question, "Which startups in NY are hiring", is updated weekly with new answers, turning the question-and-answer site into a job board.

"33Across is hiring engineers! We're looking for back-end engineers (C++/Java/Hadoop) as well as research engineers (machine learning, social networks) to help us work on our core ad targeting technology," senior software engineer John B. Lee posted on Sunday.

Wine startup Lot18 is hiring a Web engineer, front-end developer and mobile application developer, the company posted Monday.

Good luck to them--they're competing with Etsy, Foursquare, Bit.ly, Tumblr, Gilt Groupe, Meetup and SecondMarket, which are all hiring for technical positions.

And if the economy gets better, the competition for engineering talent could get even tougher."If there is any meaningful uptick in the economy, good talent that may be on the sidelines will be gone and entrepreneurs will have a tough time hiring on their own," executive recruiter Sean Carroll of Polachi in New York told VentureBeat today.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Check Out the Best NYC Tech Companies To Work For >>