Some of you may be familiar with Quora, the new Q&A site created by two former Facebook employees a few months ago. It’s just reached the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which is a good intro to the pros and cons of the site.

Unlike Twitter with its 140-character limit, Quora allows for long-form discussions. Some questions draw responses that are equivalent to multiple white papers. I tend to favor brevity in my writings, but I’m not sure that’s a virtue in this case.

What is fascinating to me is that Quora is a look into the inner thinking of the technology elite of San Francisco and Silicon Valley area. Although participants are international -- as are many of the topics -- you can see that the race is on to build or extend personal brands via erudite contributions to Quora. Its system of allowing answers to be voted up or down adds to the sense of competition among the cognoscenti in that region.

Many of the questions are around topics related to startup companies. Some are very specific to existing successful companies and are often answered by the CEO’s themselves. Others get into the nitty-gritty of why one company succeeded while a similar one failed. The site is heavily weighted toward the technology industry, but I did see two long threads where the questioners were considering suicide and those responding were trying to intervene. General societal questions on issues like politics don’t seem to stir much interest; I suppose those have plenty of other good homes in the blogosphere. And, I don’t see too many wacko questions on there either. Quora has moderators, and it’s rather self-policing as well.

TechDrawl has always fulfilled somewhat of an educational mission for the entrepreneurs of the South. We’ve talked about many specific companies and individuals, and we’ve written plenty of advice based on our experiences on both sides of the investor/investee table. To some extent I believe I can curate the questions I follow on Quora and bring you insights from a wide range of influential thinkers. Every time I make an entry I have the option of sharing it on Facebook or Twitter, but only the question shows in the Tweet until one clicks the link, and I’ve had some feedback on Twitter that my followers aren’t too interested in teaser tweets that require another step to get to my comments.

Anyway, here are a few examples to show the breadth of the discussions:

• A simple topic but one that isn’t obvious to first-time entrepreneurs: What is the difference between CEO and COO?
• Thousands of words on the future of digital advertising.
• An interesting thread on the technology that supports the mass production of startups at YCombinator.
• A topic that started out asking how you explain the semantic web to a waitress and got “politically corrected.”
• More or less a case study on Foursquare versus Gowalla.
• On the pros and cons of a “friends & family” round.
• Ask Mark Cuban a question; get an answer from the man himself.
• A few thousand more words on software patents.

I could go on, but if you actually clicked any of the links above, you have enough food for thought to last you through the next Atlanta ice storm. I’ve contributed to some of these conversations, and, if you look at more than a few you’ll start to recognize the names of those who seem to have unlimited time to write and who are generally pretty knowledgeable. I have been for some time making the case that those of us developing companies in the South need to learn as much as we can from the Valley mindset and ecosystem and to get ourselves as plugged in there as possible. Half the VC money in the US is in that area, and great deals cluster around their funding sources. Quora provides us all a vicarious armchair trip through the inner workings of the place where things are happening and the $Billions are being racked up, and we get to lob in a few of our own views as well.

Good luck if you give this try. Be sure to follow me on Quora, and please always vote me up!