Personal outsourcing

Pretty interesting story today in the WSJ about what I feel obliged to call the democratization of outsourcing. Don’t want to edit your own wedding video? Find someone in a lower-wage economy to do it for you.

Some early adopters are figuring out how to tap overseas workers for personal tasks. They’re turning to a vast talent pool in India, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere for jobs ranging from landscape architecture to kitchen remodeling and math tutoring. They’re also outsourcing some surprisingly small jobs, including getting a dress designed, creating address labels for wedding invitations or finding a good deal on a hotel room, for example.

Will Lou Dobbs haul some of the early adopters onto his show to lash them for behaving like soulless multinational citizens robbing Americans of good jobs? Will the trend industry become radicalized when someone notices that some of these bargain-priced workers are designers?

Here’s the story.