QuoraExport

Quora Answer : How much would you pay for a 3rd-party program that downloaded all your Quora questions and answers?

Jul 2, 2013

There are way more interesting business opportunities for Quora (or third parties if Quora are tolerant of such things) than just exports.

For example, I don't just want a dump of my answers. What if I want to be able to select a bunch of my answers and have them automatically formatted into a nice ebook ("Phil's Programming Answers") ready to be sold via Amazon etc?
What if I'd like to buy a book of "The Wisdom of Joshua Engel on Atheism and Evolution" to give to my Christian neighbour? Or "Venkatesh Rao's Idiosyncratic Guide To Indian History")?

Someone should be brokering a deal between Quora and LeanPub etc.

Update : Nevertheless, the start of anything interesting is getting access to those answers. Fortunately Quora provide an RSS feed, so here's a simple script I wrote to back-up my answers to my local machine. Note that it will only get the current feed's worth (last 100 answers) so history isn't available.

Update 2 : This is now a properly hosted project on GitHub. I'd be very grateful if people will try it, send bug reports etc : grabquora (Update: now rss_backup )

Update 3 : For those who prefer not to have to tackle the technology themselves, I've decided to offer the service of using this script, as a gig on Fiverr. Read more here : Scraping Quora Answers for a Fiverr