Introduction

Over the past few years, I have occasionally found myself answering questions on the site known as Quora. I generally don’t broadcast these responses, but after what I did today I thought it might be a good idea for me to do so.

I never really thought I would do this because I want my blog to be my clearinghouse of knowledge.

Somehow I like answering questions for people that exist outside of the Tableau and Alteryx communities. I think that it is the nature of the questions that inspire me to do the work, so I just thought I’d create this article to share this resource.

What is Quora?

Quora is a very interesting social site. If you don’t know about it, they publicize themselves as:

A place to share knowledge and better understand the world.

You can read about an amazing array of life questions and some incredible responses from brilliant people. I think Quora is a really cool concept and you should take a moment to click this Twitter link and see some of the insightful and educational responses. You can download the Quora app onto your android phone by clicking here.

My Content

You can find me on Quora by clicking this link. Although I have only answered a few questions (>30 of them), I think I’m going to be working more actively on this site in the upcoming years.

Why would I do this? Well, Quora is a service that seems to use some form of machine learning to send me questions. Based on the responses to the questions I have answered, I get more questions sent to me to be answered.

It is fun to see how accurate this technology is with respect to the questions it sends to me. It is intriguing for me to receive these questions and then formulate responses for a wider audience than I am used to writing for. Additionally, I can specify my fields of expertise to receive questions that might be outside my normal blogging work. I can address things like woodworking, numerical modeling, bicycling, etc.

Today’s Example of Blog Article Length vs Article Performance

Here is an answer I wrote today that investigated the relationship between blog article length (number of words) and the performance of the articles (how much were they read). I used Tableau clustering for this analysis.

Although this is an abbreviated answer, a more complete analysis will be included in my final article (part 5) that explains the results of my blogging experiment.

Click here to see my response from Today.

Thanks for reading!