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.