There are plenty of technical Q&A web sites out there.  We've all used them at one time or another, if not daily. Most often, I used sites, mailing lists and forums set up specifically for some tool I'm currently working with. In the past year, I've spent time on the Apache mailing lists, the Codehaus support forums for some open source projects, and of course on our own Peer2Peer developer community. Sites specific to a toolset or product like Peer2Peer tend to be focused and valuable.  However, generalist Q&A sites tend to devolve due under the Usenet effect and experience a high noise to signal ratio. Doesn't it drive you crazy to have to wade through piles of junk to find the golden nugget? I've been  tooling about on the "Internet" since the early 1980's, and I shudder to think how much time I've spent being the physical embodiment of a regular expression filter, looking for the right answer among the non-matches.

Recently I found out about Stack Overflow, a generalist programming Q&A site that gets it right.

A while back I stumbled on the news that Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror fame), and Joel Spolsky (yep, Joel on Software), and friends (the gang is further down the "about" page), were teaming up to create a technical Q&A site for developers. They revealed that it would be a free site, and the more I learned about it via their podcast, and other sources, the more excited I got. I began watching for them to go live.

I'm now a week into my beta membership, and I'm not excited anymore. I'm addicted. Why so?

It's free, it's fast, and it doesn't require registration (see more below).

And, I don't have to filter out the noise to find good answers. Why? Because Stack Overflow is a great example of Web 2.0 done right by delivering community driven content and value.

On Stack Overflow, you don't just post questions and reply with answers. If you do choose to register (again free), you get to participate by voting questions and answers up and down in relevance. Also, you get to categorize them into topics, as well a flagging them as too subjective and non-specific. Subjective? Yep. Stack Overflow cares about the relevance of the questions and value of the answers, and polices them via the community. As answers get voted up in relevance, they float to the top of the thread, right next to the question. Huzzah! No more reading long, irrelevant threads.

Gee, that sounds like...work. Not really, they make it fun. You build karma with just about every action, and gain badges of recognition for your efforts. Their meritocracy approach seems to be dead on. You don't get a vote in the community until you have participated enough to gain fifteen karma points. However, that's not hard to achieve. One answer considered relevant by one other person, gains you around eleven points, so it's not hard to get involved.

The Stack Overflow creators describe it as a synthesis of Wiki, Blog, Forum, and Digg/Reddit.

Okay, enough! If you want to know more, and I've barely touched on the details, go to the Stack Overflow About page, and the FAQ page to learn more. Several of us techie folks here at Appistry are becoming stackheads, so when you don't find us on Peer2Peer, perhaps we'll see you over there.