Jeff Atwood has a great blog called Coding Horror (I’ve written about it here before) and last year he (and some friends) started a new site for developers called Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow is a Q&A site – but (and I thought this before I read it on Jeff’s blog post announcing Stack Overflow), it’s not like Experts Exchange – the site that charges money for access to community-generated content (thank goodness for Google’s cache) because it’s free – as community-generated content should be. Of course, not everyone will agree with my opinion there – I’m sure the people at Experts Exchange think they have a fine business model but I think it stinks to charge money for something that has been generated by your users. Anyway, back to the point, Stack Overflow is a sort of forum-meets-wiki-meets-blog-meets-digg site for software engineers to ask and answer questions, earning reputation points based on the value of their input.
So Stack Overflow is a great site for developers but I’m an IT admin-type… is there something similar for us? Well, no – not really. There hasn’t been, but 
now the Stack Overflow guys are launching Server Fault. You can hear more about it in Jeff Atwood’s recent interview on RunAs Radio but it’s aimed at IT professionals and system administrators, running on the same concepts as Stack Overflow.
I wish Jeff and his cohorts all the best with Server Fault and I plan to spend some time over there myself. Right now the site is in semi-public beta – if you have an OpenID and you know the password then you can get in – and the full public beta is expected to commence next week.
Very cool!
I’ve been reading Coding Horror for years
I did check out Stack Overflow when it first launched but not being a developer there wasn’t much i could contribute or get out of it!
Will keep an eye out for launch!
thanks
Yes, very cool indeed!
You can read the answers on Experts Exchange by scrolling right to the bottom of the page.
@Luke – that’s why I said thanks to Google’s cache (which, as you pointed out, lets you scroll to the bottom of the page and read the responses) – I’m pretty sure that the idea of Experts Exchange is that you pay to use it though… it certainly used to be and Stack Overflow/Server Fault are far more altruistic.