Things They Should Invent: centralized repository of questions for advice columnists

There are three main parties with different needs that must be met by advice columns:

1. The columnists' need for material
2. The "askers'" need for advice
3. The readers' need for interesting columns

All three of these needs could be met more effectively by centralizing all the advice columns in the world. Askers would need only to submit their question once to a central database. Then all the columnists in the world (or, if they're big like Dear Abby, their assistants) would go through the database looking for the questions that they are best able to give productive and interesting answers to. Once a columnist accepts a question, it would be removed from the database and the asker would get an automated email that says something like "Your question has been accepted by [columnist name]. It will be answered in their column within x weeks." If a question isn't accepted within a certain period of time, it is automatically deleted from the database.

This way, askers don't have to guess which columnists would be most likely to answer their questions, columnists can pick the most interesting questions and the ones that they are best qualified to answer, and readers get all the above benefits plus avoid the annoyance of seeing the same question asked in several columns.