Did I just catch Techcrunch astroturfing?

But yeah I can see Quora being written about on it's own merits.

But to mention it on the same level as Wikipedia and Aardvark, like they are already being used by everyone...when the author himself hasn't used it...just seems odd.

The only thing I liked was the search bar, the rest just felt too cluttered.

1. Astroturf. This comes from the fake grass installed in a large covered sports stadium in Houston, Texas. The stadium was the home of a sports team called the Houston Astros, so the fake grassy turf was called astroturf.

2. Grassroots. In politics, "grassroots support" refers to support from individuals and/or small, independent groups. The analogy is that you get scattered support from the bottom up from small groups, like grass growing all around, rather than the support of a single large group like a big tree.

So you combine these phrases to get "astroturfing" - fake grass, like astroturf, that is meant to give the appearance of widespread "grassroots" support. The term can be used more generally outside of politics to mean artificially creating the appearance that a person/thing is more popular with the general public than it really is.

For example, I once read that during the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft over Internet Explorer, Microsoft hired a PR firm that proposed to send letters to newspapers across the country under different names, each letter written in support of Microsoft's position. This would give the appearance of widespread support and popularity for Microsoft, even though all the letters would actually come from a PR firm. That's astroturfing.

1. I read TC daily, and when you mention smaller startups(within other stories)...they are a direct competitor to the site being discussed.

Here it's way out of the left field. "When we think of images, we think of <art galleries>, another good company working with images is <facebook>. Now back to our story about this cool new invite site...that uses images for the site background."

+usually the smaller site is already launched. Or you say something like "blahblah, which is still in private beta"...this one just reads differently. It reads like Quora is Yahoo Answers. In fact replace Quora with Yahoo Answers and it's a perfect fit.

2. The buzz is just among a few techies. The guys from whom I found out about them, don't seem to be active users...yet they praise it all the time. Calling it the best site and super addicting. But the first guy has only 2 Qs(last one a week ago) and the other has 3 As(last one also a week ago).

Yet both praised how addicting the site was. That's why I tracked down an invite...wanted to find out what the buzz was about.

I did modify that line to clarify it