Even though Al Gore never claimed to have invented it, the “information economy” ranks as one of the most cherished concepts of the age.

We love the idea that instead of laboriously manufacturing things like cars, mittens and cheese graters, there’s loads of money to be made from the white-collar work of creating, analyzing and distributing pure information.

One proof is the euphoria for Internet stocks.

Despite all this, the ways that we trade in some kinds of information are still pretty 20th century. It’s easy enough to zip a spreadsheet around the world now, but when it comes to that kind of information we call expertise, we’re still generally limited to buying and selling it the old-fashioned way. We try to get it ourselves by taking courses. We try to hire people with experience, and we hunt for qualified consultants.

We buy magazines, we read books for dummies, and we scour the Web hoping that someone, for some reason, might have posted what we need for free.

This is about to change. Information markets online bazaars in which people can buy or sell expertise in real time stand to truly create an information economy, by making it possible to directly provide expert services over the Internet.

So when might you want to use an information market?

How does it work?

Let’s say your business has a tough tech-support question that you need help with, and nobody in-house seems to be able to help. The answer is worth money to you, so you go to an information-market site (check some of the addresses below to try this yourself).

There, you either post your question to see if anyone makes you an offer, or you browse the credentials of experts who have registered with the site and pick one who you think might be able to help you. You can check to see how others have rated his or her service, and sometimes you can get other information like the average time it takes for your expert to respond.

Once you’ve made contact, you work out the details, like exactly what kind of help you’re looking for, how you want it (over the phone, via e-mail, during a live online chat, etc.). You also agree on how much you’re willing to pay and how much the provider is willing to do it for.

The price for an answer could range from free (some providers who are trying to build an online reputation are doing this) to hundreds of dollars. It all depends on the complexity of what you need, or the scarcity of people who can provide it. Supply and demand was never like this.

When you get the information or assistance you’ve been looking for, you pay through a credit card, and the company that runs the site takes a cut of the expert’s fee. Then you have a chance to rate your satisfaction in order to help other people who might be looking for similar services.

Saving time

Assuming you find someone who can help you, this could be a perfect solution to a wide variety of problems. How much would it be worth, for example, to not only get the answer to a question, but to be able to do it without spending 15 minutes on hold with some tech-support department while they figure out if they can help you or not?

Information markets make this possible. When someone has an answer to sell you, you’ll get an e-mail message from the site and can accept or decline the bid at your convenience.

Technical problems are not the only kinds of questions that lend themselves to being answered via information markets. Other business-related topics that seem to lend themselves to the new medium include things like taxes, legal issues, marketing and finance.

It might even be possible for businesses or individuals to become professional information providers, earning their living one question at a time. The range of questions that could be asked and answered is potentially infinite.

To illustrate the potential, Michael J. Stern, president of Information Markets Corp. (www.infomarco.com), reports that his company recently did a whimsical survey of visitors to the Empire State Building to ask what they’d be willing to pay for certain kinds of information. A few said they’d offer five and six figures for the home phone numbers of Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin. A little more down-to-earth, 33 percent of respondents said they’d be willing to pay at least $50 for the answer to the question, “Which sport makes you lose weight the fastest?”

Buyer beware

If you could use or provide information in a scenario remotely like that, you begin to see the potential.

Many information-market sites are still in a preview phase, and even those that are functional are still in a relatively early stage of development. Current choices include EXP.com, LiveKnowledge.com, and Stern’s Infomarco.com (currently in a preview phase, but operational for tech-support questions), as well as companies like Ithority.com, XpertSite.com, Guru.com, ExpertCentral.com and Knexa.com.

It remains to be seen whether this idea will take off, and it may be that some kinds of questions will flourish (“Can I deduct such-and-such from my taxes?”) while others (“How can I be a better manager?”) won’t.

It’s also important for the buyer to beware. Companies that run information markets provide long disclaimers that explain that they’re just providing the medium. Like the organizers of a flea market, they’re not the providers of whatever you may end up buying, and they make no guarantee about information’s validity or an expert’s trustworthiness. You’ll have to sort that out for yourself.

But then, that’s the way it is in the non-virtual world anyway.

Christopher Ott is a freelance technology writer and author of “Global Solutions for Multilingual Applications” (Wiley, 1999). He can be reached at chrisott@ earthlink.net.