Categories
TechBiz WebApps

Stack Overflow Answers Your Hardest Tech Questions

From Jeff Atwood, the blogger who gives you Coding Horror, your hardest tech questions get answered at Stack Overflow. I wanted to see if somebody had coded a way to edit text fields in Vim, and bam, there was the answer.

picture of stack overflow
The idea behind Stack Overflow is that the collective wisdom of technologists will always be better than the experts.

So far it has surpassed my expectations on the quality, obscurity, and speed at which tech questions get answered.

Will entropy, otherwise known as spam, kill this site? Or is its reputation system good enough to prevent that?

Has anybody stumped Stack Overflow yet?

As always, your comments are very welcome.

Categories
TechBiz WebApps

Strawpoll, Twitter as a Coral Reef, and Bruce Lee

Dave Winer called Twitter a coral reef last April. It’s the highest compliment he said that he could pay.

When I see something like StrawPoll, that brings together polling and twitter, I think we have to say that Twitter is more basic than a coral reef. Twitter is like water. Without it, you can’t really use the Internet anymore. Google’s search is water, too, and it wouldn’t make sense to have the Internet without it.

StrawPoll also has a beautifully designed front page that reminds me of CSS Zen Garden, a great site for getting inspired about web design.

If you’re making a web app you might want to follow the advice of this guy:

Your web app needs to be like water. Everybody needs water.