Yahoo! Singapore Answers blog

Hi guys and gals,

We receive emails regularly from many of you expressing your interest in writing a blog post on the Answers blog. 

As much of our success is down to our amazing community members, we want to extend an offer to all you – the opportunity to volunteer a blog post and have it published on the Answers blog! 

Have you ever fancied being famous in Singapore ?  Then this is your chance!  If your blog hits the spot we may even feature it on our sister-blogs in one of the 21 countries where we blog and translate it into some of the 9 languages we operate in.  This is your chance to have your voice heard, and have millions of people read your words!

If that isn’t incentive enough, how about an extra 50 points for each post we publish??

HOW DO I BECOME A GUEST BLOGGER???

Simple – come up with a suggestion or a full blog post and email it to y_answrs_blog_sg@yahoo.com. 

However, there are a few tips and rules we’d like you to follow:

1)      What should you write about?

Focus on what would interest the Answers Community.  We are open to any subject area, even if only slightly related to Answers. This could include educational, instructional or informative topics.  Some examples are as follows:    

• Subjects that you may have professional or personal experience in, for example if you have recently planned a wedding, you may want to pitch a topic on “How to organize a wedding?”  
• Or you could pitch ideas based on your personal experience on Answers, such as tips on getting the most out of Answers, things that could be improved, and anything that you would like to share with the Answers community.

2)      Use correct spelling and grammar.  The more understandable your suggestion is, the higher the chance it has to be used or chosen as a possible blog topic.

3)      If you use any Answers content in your blog posts, it should adhere to the Community Guidelines.
 

Finally, the legal bit – your blog will be featured on the site in accordance with our Terms of Services. We reserve the right to translate and make editorial changes to your blog if selected.

We look forward to hearing from you – y_answrs_blog_sg@yahoo.com!

We received a “front-row seat” last Sunday evening, May 16, 2010 to a common and yet always awesome sight – the “evening star” visibly sitting on top of a crescent moon.  People were abuzz both offline and online as people took photos of this astrological occurrence and posted it on social media sites.

The “evening star” is, as many may know already, the planet Venus.  As community member Wiser explains in a question, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky after Moon so people thought in the early days (before we has astronomy) it was a star.

Actually, when Venus is seen in the easter sky before the sunrise it is referred to as a “morning star” and when it is seen in the evening in the west after sunset (similar to what just happened last night) it’s called an “evening star.”

How does this happen, that Venus appears as a star?  Nuscorpi223 explained that it’s because Venus’ orbit lies inside Earth’s orbit around the Sun.  When the orbit of Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun, it also reflects the light of the Sun to earth so that when it moves from the evening to the morning sky, it becomes very visible to us and appears as a “star”.

To people who have just seen this, one question that may be on your mind is if there’s any significance to the crescent moon and Venus being so close together.  Don’t worry, this natural phenomenon has no effect on Earth.  Community member podi shared that planetary alignments have been happening for the longest time and there’s never been a documented effect to our planet.

But have you ever wondered why the crescent moon and star has come to symbolize Islam?  This was asked by bettycatmouse and Schneb gave the best answer.  He said the crescent moon and star symbol actually pre-dates Islam by several thousand years. Most sources say that these ancient celestial symbols were in use by the peoples of Central Asia and Siberia in their worship of the sun, moon and sky gods.  In this Wikipedia article, it says that possibly the symbol became associated with the Muslim faith when the Ottoman Empire became affiliated with the Muslim world.

If you missed seeing the crescent moon and “evening star” last night, don’t worry.  Just click here and check out the different photos submitted in Flickr.

Today, we are introducing a brand-new quiz that will test your community guidelines knowledge! Do you know the difference between chatting and point gaming? Have you committed a violation without understanding what you did wrong? Test your understanding: it’s fun, and if you pass, you will earn 20 points!

Why are Community Guidelines important?

Our site continues to grow at an incredible speed and we have thousands of new people signing up every week. To keep our Answers community a fun and informative place it is important to understand our community guidelines.

What improves our site’s content is understanding how to ask questions and how to write a great answer. Like any other community, members must follow a set of principles in order to keep our site a safe, fun and positive. As members of our community, we want you to understand the following:

Test your knowledge!

We encourage new members of the community to read the community guidelines so that our community can continue to be a helpful place for you. By following, the above points our site will continue to be a place where members can find answers to questions that you were always curious about.

Take the community guidelines quiz to test your knowledge, earn points and let us know what you think!

This week Yahoo! Answers reached an important milestone – we received our 1 billionth answer!

From the small beginnings when we received our first answer from the public back in December 2005 we have now become the largest and most popular global Q&A site on the internet, available in 9 languages across 21 countries.

The volume of contributions we receive from the Answers community on a daily basis is mindboggling.  Yahoo! Answers currently receives:

823,966 questions and answers per day…
that works out to 34,331 per hour or 572 per minute
which is 10 questions and answers posted EVERY second!

The first answer on Answers

It’s difficult to pinpoint the first answer to the first question once Answers was opened to the public, but one of the first-ever answers came to this question -“Why are yawns contagious?”

This was one of many questions you’ve always wanted to know the answer to, but didn’t know how to find – until Yahoo! Answers came along.

The most answered questions of all time…

Through the years, we have had numerous celebrities and leading political figures appear on Yahoo! Answers.  Their questions have proven to be overwhelmingly popular with the community due to the large numbers of answers received.

Here’s a rundown of some of the biggest:

• The most popular question ever was from Hilary Clinton who received over 38,000 answers to her question: “Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?”.
• For the Singapore, the most popular question was asked by one of the editors of Yahoo!, about the controversial film-maker and entertainer, Jack Neo.  The question is “Will you still go and see Jack’s movies? And what do you make of his wife’s reaction and Jack’s mistress?” and it received almost 2,000 answers.
• The most popular question asked in Yahoo! Answers Singapore by a celebrity was from Mr. Bean actor, Rowan Atkinson.  He asked “How would you go about squeezing the most number of people into Mr Bean’s Mini Cooper?” and it received almost 600 answers.
• As part of the ONE campaign to Make Poverty History, Bono took the time to select David C’s response as the best answer to his question, What can we do to make poverty history?, from the 29,458 received.

The quirkiest questions of all time…

The following are some of the most interesting and original questions that our Answers community has asked:

• What numbers and letters do you key on you keyboard to make a heart symbol?
• Is eating the inside of an orange peel good for you?
• How far east can you go before you’re heading west?
• Why do the Chinese believe red is a lucky colour?

Drum roll…

The honour of providing the 1 BILLIONTH answer on Yahoo! Answers goes to cgramer2 for his excellent response to this question: What laptop part can I replace to speed up my pc?

Thank you cgramer2 and THANK YOU Answers Community.  It is you all who have made this site such a phenomenal place where information can be exchanged and opinions heard.  Thanks to our amazing community for making this milestone happen!

So, if you ever have a question?  Yahoo! has an answer… over one billion of them!