Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Obama Administration Promises to Answer Quora Users’ State of the Union Questions

The intelligent discussion site Quora has gotten a nod from the Obama administration on the eve of the annual U.S. State of the Union address. The White House promised it will answer questions asked by Quora users and selected by the company this week.

Quora set up a special page to live-stream video of Obama’s address at 6 pm PT on Tuesday. It’s asking users to submit and follow questions about economic and domestic policies.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick told users they must submit questions by Wednesday at 5 pm PT. He said an unspecified number of questions will be answered by the White House “in the coming days.”

Barack Obama has made a practice of engaging with Web communities on YouTube/Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Quora is a relatively small site to get such attention; it has less than half a million monthly U.S. visitors according to public measures like Compete and Quantcast.

Founded by early Facebook employees, Quora started as a Q&A service, but recently has branched into Web curation.

U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra had previously used Quora to ask users questions about open government and emerging technologies.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik