Sounds like a decent idea to me. Virtual research assistants work in a lot of areas, and I don't see why this should be an exception. I could imagine myself finding your services useful in the future. Some thoughts:
(1) If you're doing a lot of smallish jobs for people, the setting up of each job could add to quite a lot of your work time.
(2) (1) suggests you'll need to bill high per-hour to cover for the time you'll spend setting up, or try to do fewer, longer jobs (or ongoing series of jobs with the same clients). Another advantage of doing more work for the same person is that you will spend less time getting up to speed in a new area.
(3) This leads me to think the best way for you to structure it would be to take on a small number of clients, each of whom is likely to give you work fairly regularly. Not quite one-off, not quite employee. Freelance intelligence-gathering etc.
(4) Think about who exactly will be your clients. Academics, probably not. They have full time research assistants, if for no other reason than that's how departmental finances work most of the time. Large companies, probably not - they probably have interns and other such cheap sources of work-time. I think the one-man/small startup scene might be your market. Think of Patrick McKenzie (Bingo Card Creator - patio11 on HN) - he developed a relationship with a woman somewhere to write his bingo cards, simply because it's a better use of his time to pay her to do it. And he can trust her to do it consistently well - so it's like I said, not an employee, but not one-off work either (i.e. he will go to her, not look around for anyone).
(5) Perhaps you could frame your services in terms of competitor analysis ("Write me a report on all companies working on group microblogging"), which can range from business details to technical implementations, and so on; and also, as you suggest, possible relevant architectures for a project or feature a client may be interested in.
It might be hard to pull it off, but I think it could be useful to some people / teams. My somewhat HN-intoxicated suggestion would be to write up some example reports, whip up a website, and come back and offer your services. You might be worth the money to some very busy small teams.
(1) If you're doing a lot of smallish jobs for people, the setting up of each job could add to quite a lot of your work time.
(2) (1) suggests you'll need to bill high per-hour to cover for the time you'll spend setting up, or try to do fewer, longer jobs (or ongoing series of jobs with the same clients). Another advantage of doing more work for the same person is that you will spend less time getting up to speed in a new area.
(3) This leads me to think the best way for you to structure it would be to take on a small number of clients, each of whom is likely to give you work fairly regularly. Not quite one-off, not quite employee. Freelance intelligence-gathering etc.
(4) Think about who exactly will be your clients. Academics, probably not. They have full time research assistants, if for no other reason than that's how departmental finances work most of the time. Large companies, probably not - they probably have interns and other such cheap sources of work-time. I think the one-man/small startup scene might be your market. Think of Patrick McKenzie (Bingo Card Creator - patio11 on HN) - he developed a relationship with a woman somewhere to write his bingo cards, simply because it's a better use of his time to pay her to do it. And he can trust her to do it consistently well - so it's like I said, not an employee, but not one-off work either (i.e. he will go to her, not look around for anyone).
(5) Perhaps you could frame your services in terms of competitor analysis ("Write me a report on all companies working on group microblogging"), which can range from business details to technical implementations, and so on; and also, as you suggest, possible relevant architectures for a project or feature a client may be interested in.
It might be hard to pull it off, but I think it could be useful to some people / teams. My somewhat HN-intoxicated suggestion would be to write up some example reports, whip up a website, and come back and offer your services. You might be worth the money to some very busy small teams.