Charlie Spring is a carpenter by day and an online sage by night.
On typical evenings, the 40-year-old man from New York State near the Canada border swaps building tools for a computer and joins a cadre of self-appointed pundits dispensing wisdom for free at Yahoo Answers.
Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang (楊致遠) got the inspiration for Answers during a visit to his Taiwanese homeland, where a similar service called "Knowledge Search" was a national rage, said marketing vice president Patrick Crane.
"The real wow effect of Yahoo Answers, the real powerful thing, is people connecting with each other," Crane said.
The top 25 Answers gurus were treated to trips to Yahoo to celebrate the service turning one-year-old on Wednesday.
The guests said they knew each other online but had never met prior to the "birthday party" complete with balloons and blowing out candles on cupcakes in Yahoo's URL Cafe in Sunnyvale, California.
"The heart of what makes this community work is the passion of these individuals," said Yahoo manager of social search services Tomi Poutanen.
Spring has answered more than 5,000 of the millions of questions asked at the free Internet service, which taps into the wisdom of users worldwide for replies to queries of any sort imaginable.
His responses were rated "best answer" by questioners 81 percent of the time.
"I'm smarter than everybody," Spring said with a laugh as he and two dozen other US Yahoo Answers savants were honored at the search engine's Sunnyvale, California, campus on Wednesday, the service's one-year anniversary.
"Actually, it all started with wanting to be able to help people and knowing the answers to questions," he said.
Spring initially nailed questions that had gone unanswered for a day or longer. He went on to specialize in home, garden and romance.
"In home and garden I know what I'm talking about or I look up a link," Spring said of his technique. "Love and romance is a mix of opinion and experience. You don't always have to get it right to be the best answer."
Spring sometimes devotes hours nightly to answering people's questions.
"It's fun, that's the biggest thing," Spring said. "I love the points, because I'm competitive, but knowing you helped someone with a problem is satisfying."
Jeffrey Schwartz, a 19-year-old Texas college student majoring in physics, made the grade by answering questions in science.
"I saw the quality of the answers and thought I could do better," Schwartz said matter-of-factly after he and others received "Yamster Awards" named after Yahoo's cartoon hamster character. "I stick to what I know a lot about."
Responses in Answers often come helpfully couched in personal experience, said Poutanen, who gave the example of his expecting wife getting supportive breast feeding tips from other moms after fruitless standard Internet searches.
Unlike Internet message boards brimming with opinion, Answers gives reliability ratings derived from the track records of those that respond, Poutanen said.
While Yahoo celebrated the first year of Answers, rival Google was writing an epitaph for its fee-based Google Answers service.
Google last month said that it was pulling the plug on the service that failed to catch on after being launched by the search titan more than four years ago.
Google Answers was based on an idea by the company's co-founder Larry Page and enlisted researchers to find answers to submitted questions at rates ranging from US$2 to hundreds of dollars.
The online powerhouse said it would stop accepting questions this week and post the last of the answers by the end of the year.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique