Share your insights: aha.betterexplained.com (beta)
betterexplained.com
betterexplained.com
- get nascent ideas public (personal use case)
- find the best analogies/examples used to explain topics
- apply these techniques to other topics
Tech details: Running Rails3 [3.0 :)] on Heroku. I prototyped early versions entirely in javascript using jsfiddle.net.
Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned from what worked and didn't work on rulesofthumb.org?
One challenge I'm seeing is making it easy enough to contribute yet organized enough to be meaningful. At the bare, bare mimimum I'm finding it useful to collect my own thoughts so I've enjoyed that aspect thus far :).
It seems like the reverse of a Question/Answer site; it is almost a Answer/Question site, where someone posts a solution ( or a solution to a question they were asking themselves ) and others ask them about more about what they found- great!
Concerning functionality: 1)How about being able to up-vote comments? Some insights and comments are more valuable to your core community; and it would be convenient for them to be able to see that reflected, as well as allowing them to encourage it.
2)How about being able to merge similar or duplicate posts; so instead of duplicated posts in a subject you would see all the duplicated posts under the most popular/valuable post, as chosen by the users' up-votes.
It is a general-knowledge based site right now. I wonder if you could port it to existing, active sites so that you could get feedback from the wild. Have you considered enabling it as a web service?
It might be cool if there was an API such that I could link the # of "aha"'s that users had attached to my website- similar to the Face Book 'like' and Google '+1' button. Though this would be more valuable, since I don't really want to see all the people that liked a page who I am 'friends' with; rather, I really want to read valuable insight ( hopefully :) ) from strangers!
Yes, the idea was to focus on answers (what worked?) and then perhaps draw out the common questions (what is a good analogy for xyz?). For example, colorized equations seem to be an awesome response to the unasked "Help me get a plain English description of this equation."
1) Upvoting commets should definitely be added, thanks
2) Duplicate posts should be linked and combined. From initial usage, duplicates emerged. Someone wrote an analogy for understanding why negative times negative is positive and I made a new insight with my own thoughts. Ideally all such insights are grouped and the top ones bubble up.
I think integration with existing sites is the next big step :). I have some articles which are fairly popular and want to add an aha widget to them (similar to disqus) where people can share and vote on the insights that helped. Currently this is scattered in the comments on the article and difficult to parse. Once I stabilize this I'd love to open it up.
I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback here! My mind is buzzing thinking of possibilities :).
huh.badlyexplained.com -- Let's share the deep huhs? that prevented us from understanding an idea: convoluted diagrams, false analogies, cooked-up examples.