Umm, why not just go with youtube?

At this point, we've created our site, populated it with some how2why4 content, and are searching for the true purpose to help guide the design further.

We have some competition out there, and we have to distinguish our site from the competition to get enough users to come to our site.

One of the big competitors is youtube.com. It has a category of "DIY" videos. Many of them are very good, so why do we think we can do better when it seems to have the google position on DIY/How2?

Fortunately for our site, there's substantial room for improvement because of a problem I talked about in my other blog and called the single viewpoint problem. The problem is that if you're trying to learn something or get useful information off of a site, you don't want only one person's opinion. And you probably don't want to go around reading everybody's opinion to inform your own, because that's too much like a research paper. More importantly, you are not in a position, if you're trying to learn something new, to judge whether something you find on the web is correct, or not.

That's the niche that how2why4.com can fill. By the nature of wikis, blogs, forums, and multimedia, multiple opinions can be integrated to provide a higher likelihood of truth. It also can integrate the best of other sources, like youtube and wikipedia with commentary to improve not just the how2 part, but also the why4.

I'll contrast wikipedia with our site in a future post and then we can move on to more detailed design.