One of the things we’re in the very early stages of trying to do is locate people to whom we can email questions about technology and get replies emailed back to us. You would think this wouldn’t be that hard but so far we haven’t had much luck.
To start off we went to the Nearby Nerds website – it claims to have 2351 NearbyNerds across Australia listed on it’s site – and we used it’s “Find by keywords” facility to locate “Apple Mac” experts. It found 20.
We emailed 3 of them and they confirmed that they could answer Apple Mac questions.
So we emailed the same question to two of them, and got answers back, which were not exactly clear, but seemed to be totally different??? So we emailed the two of them back saying we hadn’t fully understood what they’s said and they emailed me back links to more stuff to read. But this is not what we wanted. What we wanted in relation to this particular questions was something like, “What you have to do is this this and this.”
It seems to me that one of the problems may be that the people I’ve contacted don’t see answering emails as a way to earn a decent living. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps people are not prepared to pay for the email answers I’m talking about – we certainly would be. Or perhaps they don’t enjoy answering emails. Perhaps they’re not good at it.
What is needed is people who
- Have at least a basic website setting out clearly their areas of expertise.
- Have an ordinary email address readily available.
- Who will tell you within 24 hours either that they can’t answer provide an answer or an indication as to what their fee would be to provide an answer.
- Who have a track record of answering emails well.
We’ll keep looking.
Email us at info@questionsmisc.info