In the Rough - The Blog of Joel McDonald Jr.

Jul 27 - Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, says aliens been visiting the earth for the past sixty years.

A veteran of the Apollo 14 mission, Mitchell also says world governments are aware of the alien visits, but have covered them up.

NASA denies it is involved in an alien conspiracy or cover up.

[Reuters]

I doubt many have heard about the innovative option for searching for information from your cell phone, ChaCha Search. I read about this service in the newspaper, and I immediately tried it out. Here’s the skinny on using ChaCha.

1. It’s free.
2. You can call in your question verbally, no need to try to text out your question.
3. ChaCha sends an SMS text message confirming your question.
4. A few minutes later, another SMS text message is sent to your phone with an answer.

That’s basically it! The amazing thing about ChaCha is that there are real people answering your questions, no an automated computer system. While this may cause some issues with reliability of information being sent to you, it also adds some flexibility.

I was pretty impressed by the service and have been showing it off for the last few days. I noted that the article mentioned that ChaCha employs people with flexible schedules, like retirees and students, to work as the “guides” who search for the answers to the questions sent in. So I thought, “how can I get into this?”

The process to become a guide was easy. Essentially you fill out a short application, letting ChaCha know you are interested, what you level of education and interests are, and why you want to be a guide. A day after submitting this information, I received an e-mail letting me know I had been accepted to undergo the testing to be a guide.

Those wanting to be a guide are tested for their typing skills, knowledge of ChaCha (you watch an introductory video before being tested), and basic question answering skills. After the testing is complete, you wait for an e-mail letting you know if you have been accepted for the training stage of the process.

The training for guides is composed of logging into the guide console and answering 15 questions that come through just like real questions being submitted to ChaCha. Once you complete the training questions, your answers are reviewed and you receive another e-mail letting you know if you’ve been accepted as a full fledged guide.

Guides are paid $0.20 per as an independent contractors (you submit a W9) to answer questions submitted by ChaCha. I was somewhat skeptical of the number of questions that would actually be sent my way, thinking that it wasn’t likely I would make any real money from being a guide. Boy, was I wrong! In the last four days, I have answered $41.00 worth of questions. If I keep up this pace, I will make over $300.00 being a ChaCha guide this month. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

There are two options to receive payment from ChaCha. One is through a debit card set up through them, and other other is to have payment deposited directly into your bank account, with the minimum that can be deposit at $100.00. I chose this latter option.

Overall, I say that ChaCha isn’t a bad deal for people searching for information, or for those seeking a flexible way to make a little bit of money on the side. The service is still in beta, which means that there can always be adjustments to the service in the near future. I’m thinking the big picture is to somehow advertise to those submitting questions. For the moment, there isn’t any advertising in place.

Next time you need an answer to a question, and don’t have Internet access, give ChaCha a call! You never know, I might be the one finding your answer.

I searched through the announcement of WordPress 2.5 on the WordPress blog and couldn’t find the actual name of the feature, so I’m calling it “tag auto lookup”.

I think this is one of the better additions to WordPress. One of the problems I had before upgrading to 2.5 was keeping my tags straight, exact spelling in all, to keep my posts organized.

Now when I begin typing in a tag I’ve used before, WordPress searches to find matching tags and allows me to pick from a drop-down menu. This allows me to keep my tags straight. This is an absolute time saver, as I often was forced to edit posts after realizing that I had used a slight variation of a previous tag, breaking the organization of my blog.

So, to whoever thought of this feature; I thank you.