Jeff Pomerantz points out (here) that Amazon has launched a new AskA service “Askville” (http://askville.amazon.com/askville/Index.do#answers). He does not seem so hot on it. He has some legitimate concerns, but I actually take this as a good sign. Virtual reference is alive and well. I’d love to know if the folks at Amazon are familiar with the work on the library and AskA groups (all of you lurking Amazon folks let me know). Someone might want to go use the service to ask “what other types of virtual reference services are available?” or “what is virtual reference?” or “do libraries offer these kind of thing?” and at least get these questions in the search service and test how easy it is to fin out about our work.
As Jeff points out it has some interesting use of tagging and features, and I hope virtual reference vendor types will take a look to see if there are some usable ideas here.