I always liked the idea of the Lazyweb. You could ask a question in a blog post starting with “Dear Lazyweb” and then some bot would pick it up and post in on the lazyweb aggregation site for other people to answer or help. The idea is to post not too easy to solve questions of course (nothing you can just find with a single Google search) but you can try and tap into that vast network of organic grey cells out there and let that do the thinking for you.
The whole idea stranded due to spam at some point (bloody spammers, makes you hate them even more right?) but now it seems to have a revive on twitter. Using the hashtag #lazyweb (or simply mentioning the lazyweb keyword) might be all it takes to get that enlightening answer from someone watching the lazyweb feed. The amount of replies you get isn’t that great yet but I guess it still needs to pick up a bit, and it all depends on the questions of course. There’s already a neato website called Lazytweet that picks up on it and joins the question and answer threads together and even gives you lazyweb points for participating. How cool is that? I have 16 points already I noticed. Sweet!
So, if you have one of those questions you just don’t know an answer too, but you have this distinct feeling someone out there probably knows exactly what you are looking for… try the lazyweb. It’s only a tweet away.
Photo by ~Jetta Girl~, cc-licensed.