Local Resolutions Part 1 of 29
This is the first in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.
In this post, I suggest that answering questions about your local community in Yahoo Answers is a great way to help others without leaving the comfort of your keyboard.
As a resident of our community, you know stuff. People ask you if you know where to find good sushi, what is up with impending electricity rate hikes in the area, and if you know who so-and-so is.
It turns out, people are not just asking these questions directly to friends. They’re also asking them publicly online.
And when it comes to asking questions online, one place rules them all:
Yahoo Answers.
People are asking questions about our community. Here are a few current open questions:
It doesn’t take much to see that three of these five open questions have to do with our particular Lancaster. It does require you to filter out questions about other Lancasters, but it’s pretty easy to tell the difference.
So, how do you find these questions that you can answer?
3 easy ways to watch for new Lancaster-County–related questions
Because I want people to actually help our community in this way, I’ve taken the time to cook up three ways that you can follow Yahoo Answers for questions about Lancaster County.
1. 
Follow LancQuestion on Twitter. New questions with “Lancaster” or the name of one of our county boroughs will appear as tweets from this account.
2. 
Grab this RSS feed and add it to your iGoogle homepage or your favorite RSS reader or aggregator: http://feeds.feedburner.com/lancanswers.
3. 
Get a daily e-mail by subscribing in the box below:
Why do this at all?
Many people use Yahoo Answers as a way to build and demonstrate expertise, especially because there is a nice system where you can advance in rank and recognition the more questions that you answer helpfully.
More importantly, you’ll be helping people who live or visit here.
Have you ever asked a question on Yahoo Answers that you couldn’t find the answer to elsewhere on the Web? Are you already an active answerer?
By the way, if you’re on Yahoo and would like to connect, here’s my Yahoo profile.