I want to advertise a little for a really great project: Qunu is a service where you can search for topics you need help with - and then get connected to experts or other users from this field. You can chat immediately with other people who are well versed in it! And you can do that without installing any additional software.
How does that work?
First of all every user of Qunu can become an expert. To do that you need an instant messenger that is capable of the Jabber protocol. With the messenger you contact the Qunu bot. Therefore you either start talking to the user quser@qunu.com or even better add quser.qunu.com as a Jabber transport. There you enter some profile data, the rest is controlled via commands sent to the bot, for example you'd enter a couple of tags describing the topics you want to help with. The handling is a bit inconvenient here with Miranda, the bot has some flaws and doesn't behave as described in the documentation. Especially setting the online status every time you connect / are at the computer / after a talk is a bit annoying. But since Qunu became open source I guess that'll better over time. Anyway, it's always a good feeling to help people. And that compensates for every inconvenience.
So what does a typical chat session look like?
When someone searches for a word that matches one of my tags and I'm also marked as online at that time, I appear in the search results and the user can look at my profile and read the notes I associated with the term to decide if I can be of help for them. Then they click on "Chat!" and get a note that I'm being contacted. Here a invitation for a multi-user conference will pop up. If I accept it I end up in a newly created chat room together with the user. We greet each other, they pose their question, I try to help or tell them I can't help with that, we say bye and that's it.
From my experience the people seeking help are friendly and the problems are easy ones (so don't hesitate, you could surely be of help for someone as well!). Some are a bit impatient (or just not well versed with chats) and disappear if you don't come up with an answer after one minute (or are still investigating the problem), some have questions different from the search term shown. But in any case they are more than happy when you helped them and that is simply fun!
So: try it out!
