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.

If you have a moment try out the new site and see if anything seems broken. It should work just like the old one, though URLs have changed. It’s here:

http://www.ottawaevents.org/

(Yes, I occasionally rant about sites whose URLs change; I’m working on some .htaccess magic to fix that, but in the case of the Ottawa Events site, URLs expire naturally anyway – there’s not much point in a Google search for “ottawa jazz festival” finding the 2007 page).