Askville, une étrange aventure de Seattlest

Hot diggity dog! We got a special invitation in our inbox this morning:

As a valued Amazon customer, you've been specially picked to get an early look at a new website Amazon has just launched called Askville. Askville is a place where you can ask any question on any topic and get real answers from real people. It�s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you can share what you know. You can learn something new every day or help and meet others using your knowledge. It's new, and best of all, it's free!

To start go to: http://askville.amazon.com/askville/CIndex.do?id=5#answers

("Just launched"? Hasn't this been around in an alpha version since late last year, at least? Tsk, tsk, market-speakers.)

At any rate, Askville is one of those sites where you can ask questions and get answers from other people with access to Google and Wikipedia. Like Yahoo! Answers, or the Straight Dope Message Board.

Except Askville is evidence that Amazon took to heart Raph Koster's recommendation to be more like a game. There's a whole role-playing-game aspect to the site that puts the SDMB to shame. People who are good at googling answering questions get experience points, move up levels, and earn quest coins. You can even get superpowers!

We haven't played around with the site yet, but we're looking forward to digging in (then possibly getting bored in a couple of days and remembering to check back six months from now, when it's either disappeared or become successful in ways we never foresaw).

We're excited to see that, according to Askville's tag cloud, the #1 topic with answered questions is "random crap." Ah, a category to make a trivia buff's heart sing.