Earlier this week Answers.com unveiled a new look for the homepage. It was reported here on no.stupid.answers and got a ton of feedback from loyal Today’s Highlights readers who were not exactly enthusiastic about the changes. Fortunately, the folks at Answers.com read this blog and were wowed by the comments of that entry. They’re now planning to reinstate beloved elements of Today’s Highlights from the previous homepage design (including Today’s Birthdays and Today in History). Might even see some kind of change as early as next week.

Meanwhile, there are a few ways to access Today’s Highlights on and off of Answers.com if you just need to get your fix until the homepage feature is restored:

• See the whole deal, daily and directly, at http://today.answers.com. You can even make that your browser homepage; instructions are available at the top of the Today’s Highlights.
• Sign up to receive Today’s Highlights by email.
• The Answers.com Widget Gallery offers about a dozen ways to access Today’s Highlights and other Answers.com feeds. These include Word of the Day, Wine Word of the Day, Food Word of the Day, Quote of the Day, Today’s Birthdays and Today in History. You can also get lists of WikiAnswers Q&A’s of all different categories. Get them delivered straight to you through services like iGoogle, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Vista, Apple dashboard and Facebook.
• Get the RSS feed URL of your favorite Today’s Highlights feeds; you can check them all out here.

Hold tight, Today’s Highlights fans! And thanks for all the feedback. Comment, and they will come (fix it).

Hope you’re ready to learn who won the How-To AnswerThon that happened on WikiAnswers over the weekend of November 7-9th. There were plenty of prizes to go around, since winners were tallied in two categories: Contributors and Supervisors.

The first place winners for those categories were Cobber43 and HisPowr4U, respectively. HisPowr4U actually made it with the top How-To answers overall. That is some powrful answering! Both those first place winners will receive $200 Amazon.com gift certificates and HisPowr4U will be getting a special prize donated by user Rudiful2. Hmm, wondering what  that will be…

Go ahead and check out the complete list of winners and feel free to congratulate them.

Stay tuned for the next AnswerThon…

Yesterday the folks at Answers.com unveiled a new look and feel for the reference site. It seems to be a sort of meshing of the reference world that is Answers.com with the community Q&A aspect that is WikiAnswers. Well, they are ’sister sites’ after all.

There are now three tabs to browse on the homepage, along with some featured questions and… yours truly, no.stupid.answers, featured right below. The homepage keeps the fun trivia spotlight of the old design in the first tab while highlighting the Question of the Day in the second tab. The third tab is all about community, where this blog’s Contributor Corner and What’s New columns are highlighted.

And that’s just the homepage… The topic pages have a new look and feel, too. Type in a topic, like say, blog, and you’ll see a fresh-looking page with a left-side navigation to quickly select which type of reference source you want to view.

So, it’s time for your comments. You know that feeling when you’ve gotten a makeover and some of your friends are gushing and squealing in utter delight and some of your friends are kinda like, “Oh wow… so in how long will those bangs grow out?”

Go on and leave a comment - how do you feel about the new layout? The new homepage hightlights? The new navigation for topic pages? The new Britney Spears album?

Believe it or not, there are folks out there who love numbers and stats and acronyms and that kind of thing. So I thought it might be nice to share the Answers Corporation reports for Q3 which was released last week.

And news was good! As summed up by CEO Bob Rosenschein,

“We are pleased to report a solid quarter that exceeded our guidance. The company is reporting record revenues, up 19% sequentially to $3.56 million and surpassing the top end of our guidance by $660 thousand. We turned a significant corner by achieving positive adjusted EBITDA of $520 thousand, a quarter ahead of forecast, and we are forecasting at least $1 million positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4. We believe the steps we took to reduce operating expenses this summer, as well as the traffic growth we are experiencing puts us in a good position to weather the current challenging global economic environment.” (see the press release)

That’s a lot of jargon, but like I said, there are folks out there who like that kind of thing. And you know what? It’s good news so even if some of us are not huge fans of numbers and stats (ahem) it’s something we can all smile about… Before we go back to asking, answering and editing on WikiAnswers.

There’s a new category on the WikiAnswers homepage today: WikiAnswers Local. So far the category is exploring different parts of the world including Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Philippines and the United Kingdom.

As a new section of the site, it could definitely use a boost from some ‘international’ users who have questions and answers about their specific regions. Take a peek and if you’re from one of those areas, go ahead and contribute to the new Q&As!

And you thought we were done sharing new WikiAnswers site features for the week! You think brand new Community Forums and search with snippets are enough? And you call yourself a Wikiholic…

Another new feature went live on WikiAnswers this week, and this one may just blow your mind. Mine is still splattered all over the living room.

Now, let’s say you ask a new question, like, Once Halloween is over do Americans begin preparing for Thanksgiving? (you can see where my mind is now). On the screen where you are supposed to categorize it, you will see Suggested Categories offered below the search bar. You may get up to three suggestions, and they may be right or wrong, but that’s for you to decide. If you’re satisfied, click Save, and if not, you can choose to categorize elsewhere.