The overall theme of this weblog.
My friend Alan who was describing the problem of asking good questions on a mailing list pointed out that a good question online has to account for some of the places where the readers of the list should expect you to have done your homework before. In the presence of all-seeing Google, you had better acknowledge that you have done a Google search before you launch a relatively novice question to a list full of experts.
In person, however, there's not the expectation in every instance that everyone will madly google for results to the keywords in your question. Rather, it's equally likely that people will tell some stories from their personal experience, and some of those will be ungoogleable in fundamental ways that make the in-person question's answers more satisfying than the machine's results.
Asking a good question, thus, is at least as much a part of picking your audience for the question, and ensuring that you distinguish between answers that a machine can give and those that only people can provide.
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