Help Determine What #Andyasks

Late in 2008 I started asking a question every day on Twitter. I designate it with the hashtag #andyasks and suggest that all those responding do the same. In a November 2008 blog post I talked about what kinds of questions I was planning to ask:

“I have no clear idea what I’ll ask about over time. I’ll try to make andyasks questions varied, and of broad interest. I know that they’ll reflect my interests, which include good writing of all kinds, movies, modern American culture (OK, pop culture), the arts of living well, baseball, technology, and whatever catches my eye in the paper and online.

I imagine that most questions will be lighthearted; there’s more than enough somber material floating around the ether these days. And there will rarely if ever be right vs. wrong answers. This is not intended to be a trivia contest (in the age of Google, how much sport would there be in an online trivia contest?).

I hope you’ll find andyasks to be fun and engaging, and I hope you’ll frequently take the few seconds required to fire off an answer.”

#Andyasks has been great fun for me, and judging from the volume of responses and steady participation of some folk in the twitterverse it’s also been of interest to others.

If you’d like to see the #andyasks traffic, do a Twitter search like this one. I’m working to have each day’s #andyasks questions, responses, and follow-on tweets automatically collected and displayed somehow within andrewmcafee.org; watch this space for updates on this project.

In the meantime, I’d like to ask for your help in coming up with good questions. A few people have asked if there’s a way to suggest new topics and questions for #andyasks. Well, now there is. Leave your proposed #andyasks question as a comment to this page, and I’ll harvest the best of them. If I use yours I’ll credit you by including your Twitter username when I ask the question (if you’d like to be credited a different way or to remain anonymous, please let me know).

I don’t have many rules for the kinds of questions I’ll select, except that I don’t want to start or stoke flame wars. I’ve stayed away from controversial topics like politics and religion, and intend to keep doing so. I also like questions that resonate with a broad audience instead of a narrow one.

If you particularly like someone else’s suggested question, please let me know that, too.

Thanks –  I look forward to hearing from you!

- APM