Web Worker Daily

So you’re working along at the coffee shop, latte at your elbow, building a great system for your client. But what do you do when some piece isn’t completely clear in your mind? In a cubicle farm, you could walk down the corridor and chat with your peers, but as a digital bedouin, the folks at the next table are just as likely to be experts in feng shui or bike messengers as CSS jockeys. So what do you do? Tap into the Lazy Web of course.

A few years back, web designer Matt Jones coined the term lazyweb – the notion that there are so many other smart people out there working on the web alongside you, and that if you wait long enough, someone else will write, build, or design that cool thing you were thinking about, and save you the bother of doing the actual work.

This is yet another approach to the sort of radical outsourcing we’ve discussed here before. It is entirely possible that huge chunks of code, design, and text that you need are already out there on the lazyweb. The problem is finding them.

Here’s a selection of proven strategies for making the lazyweb work for you:

Use your own blog – Tapping into the lazyweb is one of the big use cases for blogging. You can describe your project at length, and ask your readers if they know where you can find the missing pieces. This works best only if you’re not a pest about it: your blog needs to have other compelling reasons to keep readers coming back (that is, original content) so that when you make the occasional lazyweb request they’ll feel motivated to help out. And, of course, you need to have a functioning comment system: don’t count on people to make the extra effort of sending email.

Work the social networks – Have you been building up your networks on LinkedIn, Facebook, or even MySpace and wondering what to do with them? Networks were made for networking, after all, so use them! One key is to match your requests to the audience; while your MySpace contacts might come up with a great set of resources for your next country music mix tape, I wouldn’t necessarily turn there to locate a LDAP expert. And always remember that helpfulness is the currency that keeps social networks running.

If you get the reputation as someone who is constantly hitting up their list of friends (and friends of friends) for help, without ever putting anything back into the communal pool, you’ll quickly find that no one bothers to answer your questions. It’s not enough to just link to everyone in sight; to get value out of a network, you have to be seen as a valuable participant.

Hit the instant-response crowd – For short and easy lazyweb requests, try the newer breed of social network: Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce. With their character limits and flickering attention, these venues are not suited to complex problem-solving. But I’ve seen them turn up rapid answers to questions like “Where can I find a DJ for my party in Second Life?” or “I need to find a standard consulting contract I can use.”

Keep your requests short, be an entertaining community participant, and have plenty of friends in the network to maximize your return from this sort of mini-lazyweb request.

There have been efforts in the past to build a formal lazyweb structure, notably through LazyWeb.org, a now-dormant site which used syndication technologies to collect and coordinate lazyweb requests from various blogs.

Sites like MetaFilter and the newer Askville can be used for lazyweb requests too, though here again, active community participants have the best chance of getting useful answers (detecting a theme here?). On the whole, I think the best advice for this sort of message-in-a-bottle queries to the collective intelligence of the web is to toss them into those pools where you spend the most time swimming.

And remember: just as the internet contains all knowledge, it also contains all falsehood. Using the lazyweb does not remove your responsibility to exercise some critical judgment about using code and information that you receive.