3 posts tagged “question of the day”

We've all just survived a very busy time of year and now we're back at work with lots of catching up to do. Just don't forget to take some time for yourself because we all need a little down time too.

Posting to your blog is one way that you can take a few moments and make them all yours. And there's no need to stress about finding that perfect topic for your post because Vox gives you a daily prompt on the Home page with the Question of the Day (QotD). We supply the question, and you just post the answer. Just click "Post your answer" under the day's question, and you'll be taken to Compose with a title and some tags already filled in for you.

Your answer might be several paragraphs for your family or a few words for the public. It's all up to you. You're not going to be graded on this! You might find that you start answering the question and end up on some other topic, and that's fine too. We just want you writing and having fun on Vox.
 
If the question just isn't grabbing you one day, then the QotD can still give you good material for some down time. Just take a look at the responses to some of the recent QotDs by clicking "View answers" under the daily question. You might find some new Neighbors there, and it's always a great way to spend a few minutes before you have to rush off on that next errand.  It's fun to read responses to the QotD within your Neighborhood as well.  With a bunch of your Neighbors all writing and commenting on the same topic, it's almost like you're all in the same conversation.

If you have an idea for a Question of the Day, please submit it!  Just click on the "Submit a question" link in the upper right of the QotD box.  If we use your suggestion, we'll even link to your Vox blog that day.

-- Brandy & the Vox Help Team

Here's a little trick on how to keep up with tag-specific posts from people outside your neighborhood.

At Vox, we generate a number of feeds for the various pages that you and other Vox members create. If you go to the explore page or click on a global tag and scroll to the botoom of the page, you'll notice a little feed icon. That icon links to the RSS feed for that particular tag.

So if you want to subscribe to all the public posts that are tagged (for example) QotD, just subscribe to that feed in your newsreader of choice (NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, MyYahoo and LiveJournal are just a few). Not only will you be able to read all the posts in one place, but you'll have the entire post -- not just an excerpt.

- Mena

Last week, I was briefly interviewed by Jason Kottke about Vox's QotD feature. You can read the interview over here. We've written about the Question of the Day on Team Vox before, but I figured that since we've let so many new people in lately, it was worth talking about again.

As I said in the interview over at kottke.org, the Question of the Day came about sort of accidentally. There was a need to have some sort of call to action on the main dashboard page and a feature that helped people get over the writer's block that is so common in blogging. So, the QotD was born.

We've seen that the most popular posts -- or rather, the posts that get the most responses -- have some sort of nostalgia factor to them. The "what was your favorite childhood candy" was the first indicator of that. Nostalgia and the ability to quickly associate an image with a post are clearly the winners for most answered questions.

However, one surprisingly popular answer was the one from this past Monday. The question about family roots and genealogy had far more responses than we imagined. In fact, not only was it answered by a great numer of Vox users, but the answers were incredibly thought-out with a couple paragraphs written on average. I know, for me, this was the question that I read every single answer. I love learning about family histories. Some really interesting ones were Anil's, Andy's, Lane's and Yoz's.

We're incredibly happy by the uptake of QotD. In the planning stages, we realized that with neglect, this feature could be our albatross. However, the excitement shown by our users has made us want to take QotD and make it even better. Look for more enhancements in upcoming releases.

But, for now, I'm totally interested in knowing what sort of questions you all like answering most. More nostalgia? More daily lives stuff? More serious questions? More media-related? Let me know. And if you have a question, post it here. If we use it, we'll give you credit in the QotD box.

-Mena