I recently took a look at http://stackoverflow.com/ which is a site that computer programmers can go to ask for help. I have some thoughts on the site. I thought the reputation and badge system was a very clever way of getting more people to respond to questions and to get good answers out of people. It's a good thing that there's a way to vote on whether the answers are good or bad. The content is provided by the users and there's a system in place to control the chaos of the masses. As for how well the site provides answers, I just stumbled onto this relevant question from the site. In it is a discussion on the quality of the answers. It appears that providing a detailed question will increase the likelihood of having a good answer. The user was annoyed by Google responses he recieved for some of his questions. Seems like the best way to avoid that is to also add to your question what you have tried that didn't work.
In terms of structure this site reminds me of Digg.com and other similar sites. Through OpenID, I used my Blogger website as a login to the site. I'm curious about how it can ensure that I'm the person who I say I am. It would be nice if the questions were placed in categories like C, C++, and Java to give it more of a structure than just relying on tags. It's nice though that the questions can be categorized by newest, hottest, votes , active, unanswered.
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