Head Tale

The guy who runs Metafilter and AskMetafilter has added a few new features recently including the ability to see who have marked either your posts or comments as their favourites. 

I was kind of surprised to see that one question I asked requesting people describe their “perfect moments” (what someone else compared to Maslow's “peak experiences”) had been marked by five people as a favourite even though the question pre-dates the implementation of these new features by a couple years. 

Ask MetaFilter is a great resource for answering questions and librarians could probably learn a bit about dealing with reference questions by how it works (for example, why do so few “Ask A Librarian” programs fail to archive successful answers on their web sites?  Why do they not open up the answers to the community-at-large rather than relying on their own singular or limited team expertise?  Hmmm, I think I smell a paper in there somewhere!) 

Metafilter's creator tends to frown on “chatty” questions like the one I asked but these types also tend to get the most/best responses.  Another similar one about “defining childhood memories” is stunning in what people share about themselves, both positive and negative.