Knowledge market

While Aardvark probably hasn't been a commercial success I still believe that it's a big step in the right direction. Social networking is a huge success touching on an essential attribute of humans, namely that they like to share their knowledge, experience, failures and successes with each others. Civilization is build on cooperation.

Still I doesn't really like social networks in their current state. It's fine to have 100 something connection, but what use do I have from being connected and what use my connection have of me being there? Naturally we can share a lot of useful things and support each other and that is good. What I don't like so much is the information overload I get, the hidden pressure to be on line permanently and trying to improve some hidden (or not so hidden) metric. 

Vision

What is need is a collaboration platform, where you can easily find experts to provide answers to specific questions, set up work groups to tackle challenging tasks together and provide an infrastructure including databases, tools, security to support your work. And last but not least it protects your private sphere.

Value

For people who get answers to they problems the value is clear. For those who provide them the benefit is also obvious to a certain limit. However I don't see an immediate benefit for the infrastructure (or Knowledge Market) provider. Advertisement is a classic source of  income but it also has a cost; you pay for it with distraction and time.  The simplest method is to pay e.g. you can offer an amount for a timely answer (e.g. one dollar if I get a right answer within 2 hours). Time and money are easy to measure, rightness of a solutions harder. Naturally if you are notorious non payer or wrong answerer the system would know that and give you less chance in the future.  Arbitrage is also possible, and I don't think it's wrong, just in the reverse; it's a way to organize people for a common goal. Changing identity isn't a very good option either. If you build up an identity with a good reputation you won't give it up easily. And if you have a bad reputation people won't give you  their trust.