Before Andrew from { sound + design } sent me a message about his new Social Sound Design site I had already found the link to this new project, somewhere on the web. The site is fairly new and already has a lot of questions and answers on it. So what exactly is Social Sound Design?
In short it is a Q&A site for everything that has something to do with sound design, completely operated by the users themselves. Sound designers, field recordists and sound artists can post a question and other users can submit an answer, tag questions, vote answers up or down and comment on them.
It was easy to log in using OpenID and start asking and answering questions. While users visit the site more often, give good answers and become active contributors, their so-called ‘Reputation’ increases. You can also earn a whole range of ‘Badges’, for things like commenting regularly, or having a question voted up many times. I do not know if it helps keeping the quality of the content as high as possible, but it will probably stimulate some people to keep contributing.
I really like the Social Sound Design idea, and if the community becomes large enough it will almost certainly grow into a valuable database of content. If you want to record something and you cannot decide which microphone to use, or you just want to learn a lot about all kinds of sound design related topics, this is a great site to visit!