It's the StackOverflow system, hosted and available for use for other content domains, e.g.: http://answers.onstartups.com/ (excellent startup discussion)

Some other content domains here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/list-...

While the “product” is the same, what you need to bring to the table is the priming of the community. OnStartups (via HubSpot: MIT Sloan inbound marketing company) had a blog first (like Joel & Jeff's blogs vis a vis StackOverflow).

It looks like moms4mom.com is getting traction, it'll be interesting to watch the various attempts and what “mix” they bring to getting the word out there.

Great analysis of stackoverflow.com. “Lurk and learn” is an interesting concept. Here are some of my thoughts on replicating this model across other verticals.

It sounds like you are doing a good job going through different verticals to test their validity with this model. But I would wager that you would be hard strapped to find another niche that is as active online as developers with a clear incentive to participate in the community. stackoverflow.com saw an opportunity in the market to make expert-to-expert knowledge easy to find and validated. These tend to be very cut and dry questions (it works or it doesn't).

As a web developer with over ten years of experience, I have noticed a lot more stackoverflow results in my searches recently. Congrats to their team on providing relevant results to searches. This is one of the main goals behind their site. “search and solve.” If some day I could have stackoverflow.com open next to my text editor, and every time I hit a snag, I drop my query into their search and can find a relevant solution, awesome. Would I necessarily go there to learn a new concept? At least now now.

You should take a look at some of the home pages for the programming projects that stackoverflow covers and see that these environments are set up to educate. Ruby On Rails for example. Take a look further and you will find many individuals who narrate at great lengths through blogs, video tutorials and more traditional pages with interactive examples. For me, this is where a lot of learning happens.

Another reason stackoverflow is pretty successful at providing great results is their searches have relatively low “value,” or corporate interest. Meaning that there's not a bunch of companies competing for the searcher's $ on a query like “Timeout::Error (execution expired):”. If you applied this model to something like healthcare, and wanted to provide answers to searches like “what's the best health insurance for a family of 4 in New York,” good luck getting in the top ten.

I've got a few ideas for niches that might work…including….well, let's sign and NDA first.

If anyone is interested in having a stackoverflow.com “environment” for their site or wants to drop some angel capital on a new startup. Please visit http://www.bizbutter.com and contact my team.

a few things I noticed:
-the forum is tag-based rather than category-based. This a huge evolution over most message boards, which are powered by the same piece of software that does not allow for this functionality.
-badges are huge. I also love how they incorporate some nerd jargon, e.g., Woot of woot.com, necromancer from warcraft. clearly I am a nerd for knowing this.
-clean design– answers to threads are lead visual (it makes sense that Google was behind this design).

-You're hitting on a huge topic of building communities. I found Feverbee (http://www.feverbee.com/) to be a good blog for insights on how to attract members and stimulate content creation.

-the “hang-out spot” is something that I've noticed to also drive the power-users and overall sense of community. Woot.com is one of the most absurd examples of such a community, with a vibrant message board of thousands of users. Same thing with Yelp.

thanks for the comment, alex. see you soon –

You might be interested in the very popular blog Joel Spolsky has been running for years, if you don't already know about it. I wonder if its popularity may have been the “secret sauce” to attracting people to Stack Overflow.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/