WebProNews

There's a new API and web service available on the Internet. This one comes from question and answer site Answerbag, whose founder Joel Downs said the API offers sites flexibility in monetizing their pages.

We had chatted with Joel a few weeks ago about the new service. He was optimistic about its prospects. Answerbag has a feature that separates it from services like Yahoo Answers; the site actively culls duplicate questions from its index, and directs people entering a duplicate question to the existing entry.

Site publishers will see the benefit of building a community with an approach that differs from the typical message forum. Users can rate questions and each answer they receive. The feedback improves the quality of the Q&A exchange for the next people who visit.

Even though a lot of Internet users may have missed Answerbag, the company has built up a strong index of 3,500 categories in hundreds of verticals. They have some 300,000 answers to 100,000 questions, all rated to various degrees by the registered userbase.

"Answerbag offers website owners business models based on either revenue sharing from advertising or through a licensing fee based on utilization of the technology," they noted in the API announcement.

For a nominal licensing fee, Answerbag can provide a site access to its API. Details of the schema may be found at Answerbag's XML API documentation page.

Using the API, a site publisher can construct a page focused on questions and answers tailored to that site's niche. A sample site posted at http://trails.answerbag.com/ shows how a presence that emphasizes outdoor activities could make Q&A part of the online experience.

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