2 weeks ago Qassia.com was featured here in an article as a way to get free backlinks.   Qassia is an effort to acquire user submitted “intelligence” (articles) on all topics.  Similar to Wikipedia or the upcoming Google Knol, Qassia hopes to be a storehouse of knowledge.  In exchange, they pay you in backlinks and Qassia Dollars.  Now we revisit Qassia and see the results. 

To test this service I submitted my Top 5 Entrecard Tips and Tricks article.  This earned a C++ rating and paid me $100 Qassia dollars.  Next I submitted the Create an Entrecard “monthly top dropper” widget for WordPress for an E++ rating and $40, almost the worst possible ranking.  Clearly the Qassia reviewers were clueless.  They were confusing “intel” with “quality articles”.   A recipe is good intel, a review of the recipe isn’t, it’s opinion.  Also, reviewers were giving long intel high marks and short intel low marks regardless of quality. 

Bottom line, Qassia is “Garbage in, Garbage out”.  You don’t learn anything there you wouldn’t learn from simply Googling the answer.  Already I see people gaming the system for a couple of worthless Qassia Dollars.  So to have some fun, I submitted the following “intel”.

Determining where that smell of flatulence came from
He who smelt it, dealt it. That means the person who notices the smell is usually the guilty party. Better to make a face and not say anything, This way you acknowledge the unpleasant smell, without actually saying it exists.”

Good intel?  You betcha!  Silly and immature?  In the extreme, and also good for $20 Qassia dollars and an E++ rating.  Seeing as how you can write 2 short crappy articles faster than one good article and still end up getting panned by the Qassia review snobs,  Game away.

Is Qassia useless?  Not at all.  It’s just one more tool for those who Digg or Sphinn every article they write.  Eventually you may be able to spend your Qassia dollars on advertising.  I’m $2,490 Qassia dollars richer than before I tested the service.   Remember, Qassia is still in beta testing and new features and improvements arrive daily.   The promise of backlinks has yet to materialize because it hasn’t gone live, but I got quite a few just writing about the service.  Check out Qassia for free.