There are a lot of question and answer services on the Web, some in the forum design, but it seemed that the most prominent in this sphere is Yahoo! Answers. Imagine a city-centric New York version of Yahoo! Answers, it leads me to AdviceYard, a Q&A site that anyone can use and post question about anything in NYC (New York City).

AdviceYard is a well-designed Q&A site with most of the questions are organized by NYC. The site has a very strong community focus, as all the questions posted must be categorized under any of the communities given, may it be beauty, style & fashion, going green, heath care, or the others. Of course, there is a scenario whereby certain questions are not given an answer, but if you find a good answer to a question posted, a user can rate a point to that answer for the recognition purpose. To further encourage users to get involve in a community, the idea is a user can register any of the communities he/she interested during the sign-up process.

For questions given to a particular topic, for instance, bar or karaoke places, you can get a more specific and objective opinion since this site is NYC centric. If you’re worry of keeping up with the questions you posted, there is a live notification feed in your profile.

On the business side, AdviceYard’s business model is relatively simple. Unlike Yahoo Answers and other Q&A sites, AdviceYard offers a premium membership which provides the ability to post business listings for a one-time fee ($60 for 6 months or $100 for 1 year). These listings are indexed in up to three (3) related communities, on the user’s profile page, and on a dedicated business page. An example of the business listing can be found here.

There are many sites that utilized Yahoo! Search BOSS and successfully built their own vertical search engines. For the green search engine, the typical example is Truevert. And despite the fact that Truevert search engine is powered by Yahoo!, but it uses its own proprietary, patent-pending technology to select and rank the results it gets from YAHOO! instead of render the generic YAHOO! green results.

Basically, green issues are hot right now. For those who want to search the green stuff for the good of the planet, Truevert has a simple interface that includes search function in addition to the recent green news which are all pulled from the popular green Web sites.

To know more about Truevert, I’ve embedded a visual presentation about this green search engine. Enjoy.

Truevert Vertical Semantic Search

View more documents from Truevert.

For the Web designers, getting the client sign-off seems to be the most important thing, though there are times when clients think that the Web development is not yet finish, and there is disagreement occurred. If you’re a Web designer, and you thought the Web project was completed, and you wondered that if there is a tool that can helps you to be more efficient, even that if you have not start to code for the client in this aspect.

To help solve the sign-off issues, a UK firm Headscape has developed a tool for the creative professionals to get their design sign-off. This tool called GetSignOff lets you create designs for your clients and acts as a two-way communication channel between you and your clients in pertaining to the design’s specification.

It was on the basis that presenting the Web design and getting the positive feedback are the core issues for making the both Web designer and clients happy about the Web project. To cater to these needs, GetSignOff provides a lot of functionality and usability such as up to 30GB of storage space, customizable domain names, etc. To use GetSignOff, luckily it has a free and paid plans for up to $59 per month for its “Enterprise Account.”

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a very common way to distribute or subscribe to the frequently updated Web content such as blog postings or news items. If you have a feed reader with you, and you use it quite often, you will find it most useful and well suite your news subscription purposes.

However, there are advanced use of RSS other than the aforesaid RSS reader. One of them is referred by us as RSS mixer. In technological settings, RSS mixer is by mean a very advanced RSS tool with some great set of options to help you to combine and filter feeds and do some conversion out of the results.

There is a RSS mixer called FeedMingle that worth a look. FeedMingle has an easy to use user interface and one of the great features is that you can use it without any registration. To use it, simply enter the feed URLs, and follow the instruction on its interface by giving your favorite feeds a title, FeedMingle will then combine all those feed into one. An online feed aggregator, if you want to, then you can copy and paste the code to your blog or Web site as a widget option. Also, theme design and short text options for the widget are available. But if you want to use the combined feeds for creating mashup, FeedMingle has already converted the feed URLs to RSS, Atom or JSON format.

In overall, I feel FeedMingle is a promising RSS mixer, and its interface is very easy to use, thus even the least technical savvy users will know how to mix their favorite feeds.

Finding a good, memorable dot com domain name is virtually a difficult task. It is due to the fact that most of the short, keyword-domain names have been taken, not to mention if you want to further build the domain name and makes it as a worldwide brand.

Although there are several marketplaces purposely for domain names, such as DNForum, or you went to eBay, you might end up buying several domain names and you wouldn’t know which domain name is the right one and starting to build something on it. In fact, buying a good domain name could spend you endless time in evaluating the domain name, go through the domain appraisal, and etc processes, but if you willing to pay a hefty premium for domain name, you now have a new option by visiting this newly launched site called BrandBucket.

On BrandBucket, there are all types of top-level domain names currently offered by them, ranging from below $500 to over 5K and above. For the domain names you like, you can first favorite them and then send all to your email before further buying decision to be made. Perhaps you want to recommend any one of the domain names to your friends, you also allowed to use BrandBucket’s system to send the domain description to your friend’s email address. Besides, I think what you might like on the site is the “Resource” page, there are free tools and several designers’ contacts so that after you bought the domain name from them, you know where to get the top designers for your startup.

As I am not becoming younger and younger everyday, I tend to be forgetful on certain things that need to be done. I tried to source for a good reminder service on the Web and in fact there are many of them. Yet new reminder services are being introduced and one of them is Superminder.

As the name implies, Superminder is essentially a reminder service that remind us on things to do for Web content. After you signing up for the service, you can go to your personal dashboard and add reminders, or change the timezone. However, before the system automatically send you the reminders, you must first input the confirmation key that Superminder sent to you. Of course, you can schedule your reminders and the reminder messages can be delivered by email or automated cellphone. Thus, it will be most useful if you do not want to miss any big date in your life. Perhaps you want to support Superminder for the great service it delivered to you, you can support them by buying the SMS credit from them.

From a user’s standpoint, Superminder didn’t have many differentiating factors from other reminder services out there on the Web, but it has a very easy to use and clean looking interface.