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I am curious about how many NON-programmers are using these StackExchange sites. Are they attracting new users or just the subset of StackOverflow users that also like X (cooking, gaming, etc)?

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The end goal is probably to get into google results. There may be an advantage against something like Yahoo Answers by having a committed community for a particular topic and drawing experts to that community (haven't seen much expertise on Yahoo Answers beyond what you could find with basic google skills).

The beta (Area 51) idea is that some subset of programmers will be gamers/cooks/photographers. They form the "seed" group, since they know the SO model but also have these less-techie interests.

Then we hope that they'll tell two friends, and so on. That's the experiment.

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