Spolksy and Atwood's StackOver is a huge success
siteanalytics.compete.com
siteanalytics.compete.com
Whereas I see people ask a question on SO and... what exactly do they do next? Sit for hours hitting 'refresh' every minute or so? SO is great for googling for similar questions answered in the past, but I just don't understand why people post questions there in the first place.
Sometimes I think that if IRC hasn't existed and someone would have launched it now as a fresh idea, all tech blogs would be filled with "IRC changes everything" and "the game is over for slow HTML-based collaboration"
Am I missing something?
As for the technical, I remember the first time trying to get on irc and as a cs undergrad, wondering why the hell it was so complicated, I run an xmpp chatroom and that is only marginally easier, these arent inherent problems with the protocol, just the software around is entirely unusable. facebook / meebo and mibbit are helping overcome this, but it isnt there yet.
I have wondered how to solve the problem chat knowledge being unable to persist, even with public chat logs, an answer on a forum etc is still much easier to comprehend for a 3rd party than an irc log, but havent come up with much
I find a lot of application / language / library developers are in irc reasonably often, whereas the questions on forums are a bit more of run of the mill how do I do types
1) I find IRC completely unusable - I've been on the net since 1994, I've tried IRC multiple times, and it just doesn't gel with my head, sorry.
2) I don't use SO when I need an immediate answer. At the very least I'll put a query in, then wander off and google some more in the hope of finding an answer, then come back in half an hour. More usually I'll leave it overnight while i get on with something I do know how to do. It feels like the same sort of dialogue timescale as a mailing list query, but for where there isn't an appropriate mailing list.
But I may not be typical.
But a couple months back I got linked to by Mathew Ingram and, while Michael Arrington was covering Mr. Ingram's post on Techcrunch he also shot me a link. As you can imagine that generated a huge bump. But Compete actually had my numbers trending down for that month (cut in half in fact) and the month after as well (which was completely contrary to my Analytics readings).
So now I don't even have much faith in the site for trending data.
No it doesn't. Their graphs for Justin.TV traffic aren't even usually the same shape as the real thing.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+grader.co...
(Which is surprising. Grader.com is nowhere near as useful).
The number 1 thing you need to remember is that the data is not useful as an absolute measure - it's only good to compare sites.
The number 2 thing to know is that if you compare similar sites, the comparisons are more accurate. So if you compare trailbehind.com, everytrail.com, and backpacker.com, the comparison will be a lot more accurate than if you compare cnn.com, stackoverflow.com, and myspace.com.
Number 3 is these sites are more useful if you have benchmark data. For example, if you want to know the traffic for a magazine type site, go download their media kit (usually available as a PDF on their site), and it will tell you their traffic. Then you can use this data for understanding Alexa better.
I'm honestly not trying to attack you but there are several posts below (mine included) that indicate what you are saying isn't the case. If you have a factual basis that says we're wrong I'd be interested in hearing it. But in this post you are simply stating absolutes without backing those absolutes up.
I guess what I'm asking is "how do you know what you are saying is true?"
Download the media kits, see how much traffic these similar sites get, and then see what the error is on Alexa. I think you'll find that the numbers are of the right order of magnitude.
You're going to get a pretty clear signal when looking at sites relative to one another, since most of the error will effect the sites the same. And if you have sites that have the same sorts of traffic patterns, then the relative signal should be even clearer.
It's true that people gaming the system effect the numbers, but that's not going to distort the numbers enough to make them worthless.
You can't use Alexa or similar to see whether one site has 3000 visitors a month and another has 3500. But if one ha 3000 and one has 30000 then you'll see it in the graph.
You are right, though; the reason why I started listening to the podcast was because I enjoyed reading Joel on Software and Coding Horror, and I've continued to stay because the show is much more casual than any other programming podcast I've come across (other shows I've found tend to take themselves a little too seriously).
Anyways, that's just my opinion, but I do think that a podcast is a great way to build buzz for a site, and if you know of any shows similar to Stack Overflow I'd love to hear about them.
Please tell us Joel, what do you think really mattered in order of preference or apprx credit (say)?
- a much cleaner, better product than anything that exists out there ?
- market need.
- Seed traffic (hence contributed content, satisfying experience and stronger word of mouth)
- High profile startup in relevant space.
- SEO
- word of mouth and viral effect because of satisfying experience
I think the site is excellent, and looking forward to more growth as more eyes provide better questions/answers!
Not just the one page, no, everything. I'd subscribe as a paying customer if they offered that feature.
Now, how would like to make the payment? ;)
You can also just add -site:expertsexchange.com -site:experts-exchange.com to your keywords.
Wire transfer ? Pay Pal ? Cheque ? Cash ? My firstborn is spoken for.
Amazing, that's what I get for shooting my mouth off.
The funniest thing is I do something just like this on a site that I own to search for music files removing all the fake sites, but I never thought of using it to improve my regular searches. I simply used a submit form that sets the source of an iframe to googles result page. Works dandy.
Thank you once again, you had me laughing there!
Are there enough smarties (experienced smart programmers) on the forum to answer all the inane newbie (inexperienced programmers) questions? And if there's too many newbies it's possible that incorrect or sub-optimal answers will get voted up because there aren't enough smarties to realise what are optimal answers.