Yahoo! Answers

I've become somewhat addicted to Yahoo! Answers in the last few days; no doubt partly due to essays being due in soon.

The idea is anyone can post a question and anyone can answer the question. After four days the person who posted the question gets to vote on which answer was best. Anyone can rate answers too. It's on a points based system so you have to answer questions to get to ask questions and people who provide good answers get good ratings and so on.

It's kinda neat. In the last two days I helped a girl in America fix her computer (Windows was playing up), some kid* somewhere with rephrasing the introduction to one of his essays (it just needed a bit of structure), a guy in Australia who wanted to know about their legal system terminology (he quite possible got arrested for drunk driving but was let off the hook from the way his question was worded), an eight year old who wanted to know what lateral-thinking was, and a guy in America who couldn't understand how George W could be president if he didn't win the popular vote.

You also get some slightly crazy questions. One girl was asking what she should do because her friend, who is 17, is nine weeks pregnant and smoked weed. I responded saying that she shouldn't panic because occasional weed usage itself has not been linked to birth defects, but that the smoking part is dangerous so she should tell her friend to try and stop. This got some negative ratings because clearly telling the truth about certain drugs is just wrong. The post below me (which got tonnes of positive ratings) said "All illegal drugs cause birth defects" &mdash all illegal drugs? By their very nature of being illegal? Does it depend on which legal system you're in as to which drugs cause birth defects? Apparently so. Another person had told her "Get an abortion. She's too young" presented as a fact &mdash nice.

My favourite was from some 15 year old guy in America who had found a famous model on MySpace. He added her as a friend and she accepted. He was really excited that he had a chance with this famous model. I felt a bit bad telling him that a lot of people use MySpace for free publicity and will add anyone as a friend. But he had to know.

There was also a person completely confused as to who the Queen is married to over here because she saw the movie The Queen and the Queen is married in that and she's got kids but we don't have a king. So who the hell was this mysterious man?! I explained that in the British monarchy if a guy marries the Queen he's a prince not a King (for old fashioned sexist reasons i.e. a Queen is inferior to a King).

You have to learn to blot out the stupid questions and the even more stupid answers. But it's kind of rewarding to help people with their homework (as long as you don't just answer it for them &mdash only advice).

* You know it feels sort of wrong responding to a child's question online. You feel like the paedophile police will break down your door at any moment. Even though there's no direct communication. And all you're doing is giving them help with some homework. There's just so much stuff nowadays that makes it just seem wrong. That's a shame.