Offering Help on the Web

Requests for technical help posted in various web fora and bulletin boards regularly pop up in Google Reader and elsewhere. I’m often in a position to help, but I don’t want to sign up for dozens of user accounts and deal with buggy fora software just to be able to post a reply. Many of these places are plastered with blinking advertisements as well, and painful to look at.

I would send the posters email, but they rarely include an address or any way to communicate other than the website. In the days of usenet things were simpler, and in some ways better. In other ways, the online world is better now, but more fragmented.

However, there are some almost-new technologies that can glue the fragments together. Since I’m already using these technologies, I’m going to experiment with exploiting them to satisfy my urge to help my fellow creatures while staying on my own turf.

I’m going to begin offering direct replies to technical questions that I find on the web right here on my own website. I’ll put the posts in my atom feed, so pubsubhubbub will shoot my answers instantly to the world’s feed readers. If the original seeker of help uses Google Reader or some other service to monitor his topic of interest, there’s a reasonable chance the answer will pop up quickly. If he or she relies instead on manual Google searches, good search terms will uncover the reply as soon as Google indexes my new pages.

Ideally people would just skip the web fora, set up their own websites, and use the “lazyweb” to ask for help. One can imagine software that brings together these questions and answers from various sites into a conversation: a kind of virtual web forum, not under anyone’s control. It would be like Twitter for grownups. I hope someone is writing this already.