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America Online has announced the arrival of it's "Show Me" website, a user-generated forum geared at providing a means of self-help for visitor in any number of various topics.

These types of question/answer sites are becoming a dime a dozen recently. Yahoo clearly has the bulk of the "answers" market currently, but other companies such as Amazon (Askville) are looking to leverage themselves as legitimate competitors in the user-generated Q&A sector.

Now, you can add AOL to the list of "answers" services as well.

A UK version of the service launched in late December. According to AOL, the site is already full of numerous "how-to" articles as well as answers to a wide variety of questions covering topics ranging from pole dancing to photography.

David Gilbey, VP Content and Services at AOL UK says "AOL Show Me is a great product that is incredibly useful while still being a lot of fun. It allows users to check out how to do those little things like change a light bulb or wire a plug, that perhaps they have always been too embarrassed to ask."

AOL Show Me offers a couple unique facets that Yahoo Answers currently lacks. While being able to offer answers in a conventional text format, users can also freely upload their videos and picture as well, sharing their knowledge with the Internet community at large.

Even with the unique features, AOL has a metric ton of ground to cover if it wants to compete with Yahoo in the realm of user-generated answers.

The gap will most likely get wider before it becomes any smaller, as Yahoo has implemented several Digg-like social bookmarking features into its answers service. These features as a whole have generated a very positive response from the service's user base.

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.