You've got questions, they've got answers...

I’ve written before about the excellent isle@sk service, also known as “the only useful project to come out of the Smart Communities pot of gold.”  You ask a question, and within a day one of the Island’s crack reference librarians gets back to you with answer.  I’ve used it several times, and I’ve always been pleased — overwhelmed even — by the results.

If you’ve read The 4-Hour Work Week, you know that “personal outsourcing” is all the rage these days: using the Internet to get “it doesn’t matter where you do the work from” work done for you by pay-as-you-go teams of “virtual assistants.”  GetFriday is a popular example, and I’m just in process now of setting up an account with them for my friend the choreographer, who’s always coming up with questions he needs answered like “I need photos of 6 designer penthouse apartments with skyline views” to fuel his creative pursuits.

Somewhere in the middle between neighbourhood librarians and on-call virtual assistants are the research services that spun off from the erstwhile Google Answers.  I’ve a friend who’s outsourced much of his day-to-day business research to outfits like this, and speaks highly of the results.

So much so that I decided to try out Uclue, one of the better known gathering places for the Google Answers dispossessed.  So I posted my question — the same one I asked here earlier about the closing credits music for the season opener of Mad Men — and, whadyaknow, within 24 hours I had my answer (the music is an original composition by David Carbonara).  Cost me $20.

Was it worth it?

Well, before I thought of Uclue, I spent much, much longer than the 20 or 30 minutes of my own time that would buy futzing around in my amateur way looking for an answer.

So to buy may way out of a diverting obsession, yes, $20 is an excellent price, and a fair deal.