SteveX Compiled

I recently moved into a house that’s about 30 years old and I’ve been dealing with lots of little house problems. Of course I turn to Google for answers but often all I find are people asking the same questions, often years ago, and conflicting answers.

The engine that Jeff Atwood has built for Stack Overflow is designed to be the ultimate Q&A website engine, and seems well suited to bringing all this together. They’ve created a hosted version of Stack Overflow called Stack Exchange, and it’s open for beta signups now.

So I created Sink Overflow, a Stack Exchange site geared towards the kinds of problems you might run into around your house. Plumbing, heating, electrical, whatever.

What I’d really like is for people to contribute content. If you have any of these sorts of issues that you’ve had to deal with recently, please post a question, and then answer the question. Even if you don’t know the answer, ask the question anyway – hopefully someone else will.

The key to building a site like this is drawing in a community. I’m still working on how to do that. I’m even open to the idea of paying people for good answers to questions if I can come up with a way of doing that, although I know Jeff is opposed to the idea.

I’m still testing the waters on this idea, so I’m also interested in what happens to a hosted knowledge exchange site when the owner decides to pull out. Does that content disappear? Will Stack Exchange offer to let someone else buy the site and keep it going? Will Stack Exchange simply assume ownership of it?

Either way, if Sink Overflow does get some good content and for some reason I don’t continue with it, I will make sure that content stays on the Internet somehow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 7:26 am and is filed under 19. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.