Thursday, October 22, 2009

What could a question-and-answer service be?

When I was young at primary school and at secondary school, I thought that it would be great if free solutions were available. No Internet. There was no Internet. All I could consult was dictionaries, reference books, my teacher and my classmates.

Years later, the Internet has become very popular. I would like to set up some free websites to help people learn English. http://my.radiier.info/ is not the full-of-advertisement thing in your mind. You just don't see any advertisement at this site.

Many online marketers use "help" as a tactical way to boost business. At least at the beginning stage, I am not doing this. It's a genuine ads-free website for the English language.

I thought that a question-and-answer website is the very basic of its kind, consisting of very basic functions for asking and answering questions.

How could I do that? I spend after-work time to do it. No one can really ever live only on the Internet. Offline activities are still important for me to earn a living.

With a genuine question-and-answer platform in mind, what questions do I accept? Well, I am better at a "general" kind of translation. I still try technical stuff if you need some assistance. I can do English-Chinese translation for your reference. I can also do Chinese-English translation. Added to this, I accept proofreading things in English. I can check for grammatical errors and writing styles.

What do you need to do? Make you questions clear. "What is a verb?" kinds of questions are very broad. I can only respond by giving examples and illustrating the concept with my examples. "What is the difference between X and Y?" kinds of questions are more realistic in getting a more sensible response. You need to be specific.

Why do you need to register? It is for security purposes. I tried to provide no-registration service and I estimated that 70-90 per cent people gave me fake email addresses. I couldn't stay in touch with them in any case. They left some questions and I just posted them on my site one-to-two years ago, hoping that someday they would return and see the answers. Your email is the most important piece of contact information I can use to contact you. I don't spam. I don't like being spammed either. I send emails with the "from" address ending in "radiier.info". When you need to verify your email, put this domain name into the whitelist.

Will I put advertising on this site? Hopefully the least amount if possible to keep it running, for example, for paying the server renting cost. There are many small sites in the world full of advertising and people simply hate them. Visitors just stay away from advertisements. To keep this site running, I think of providing English classroom services online. If you have an idea. Please comment.

Hope that you are happy with my site.

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