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I recently interviewed Guy Kawasaki, who is becoming rather known for his ability to launch websites for increasingly shrinking prices. So when we received an email in the Mashable inbox with "$10K for Alltop? Guy Kawasaki got taken!" as the subject line, our interest was effectively piqued.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]So who's the man that made such a claim? Chris DeVore, of Askablogr. His service creates a sidebar widget for web publishers to place alongside their blogs, enabling readers to anonymously submit questions. These questions are sent to the web publisher via email, and can be answered trough Askablogr's service. The questions are then posted on the blog as their own entries, "automagically."
This way of taking reader-submitted content and turning into blog content is an interesting way in which comments/questions/general feedback is made front-and-center for the web publisher's purposes. The concept of removing comments and questions from the depths of bottom-heavy blog post pages is something a number of services, like coComment, are trying to do in various ways. The question is, does Askablogr do it well?
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Unlike other Q&A widgets that remain a dynamic portion of a web publisher's site, Askablogr is more of a submission tool for any question that can be sent to a blog's writers. That removes a contextual connection questions may have with an individual blog post. This format works well for advice columns, or for any other bloggers that enjoy making reader-submitted content an integral portion of their own publication.
On the flip side of the coin, Askablogr is also a traffic-driving community. Readers and web publishers alike can create an account, and keep track of the Q&A sessions they've been member to. Askablogr retains all of the Q&A posts that have made it to a blog, makes them searchable, and provides a link back to that blog, through its site.