probably not given that MetaOptimze has a whopping 300 users, submitting 59 questions and 129 answers.
and is far more than 69 for AI (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-in...), 40 for ML (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7607/machine-learn...), 16 for NLP (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2761/natural-langu...), 5 for data mining (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4229/data-mining).
(The original blog author means Area 51, not StackOverflow per se.)
A large measure of StackOverflow's success-- perhaps the most significant factor-- was the immediate traction that came from readers of Joel and Jeff's blogs. SO had a ready-made audience, due to the notability of its sponsors.
It's not at all clear to me that this is scalable via the Area51 model.
Clearly, it takes more than 360 people to make a site successful. The question is: who is in the best position to attract the attention of the prospective users quickly and effectively? Time will tell, I suppose.
I'm willing to bet bravura at this point. Simply because he has the traction way way before the Stackexchange versions launch plus he has all the communities together. All it needs is a little momentum and Area 51 sites will struggle to catch it.
> Clearly, it takes more than 360 people to make a site successful.
Successful for it's founders, yes. But for me, the reader, I'm quite happy to have only the few thousand most-active researchers and professors and their students of Machine Learning, NLP, etc; post on metaoptimize.com. Otherwise, I might as well go to Yahoo Answers for generic, watered-down responses.
One of the problems with the area51 process is that most of the people participating are from the current SO sites, meaning that it is always going to be very biased towards tech based setups without looking at what could also be mainstream successful.