Guillermo wrote:

It is a really great idea since stackoverflow is searchable on google, therefore people can find answers easily.

For that the mailing list works just as well.

Besides one feature of stackoverflow is that answers get voted on by users, therefore the most popular answers bubble up naturally.

That is no longer the case. The first year that worked pretty well, but if you take a look at more current questions you'll see that Stackoverflow is basically dying. The gamification is no longer working. Quality of the questions is getting pretty bad: very detailed questions with less and less relevance. The refusal to deal with questions relevant for software and team development is also not helping.

Another point is that often popular answers are simply wrong. There is a very large cargo culture visible. Just take a look at the OODB questions.

It is a pity that nobody tried to visualize the number of answers, votes and comments the questions get over time, and the size of the different communities.

It's not that I don't like the format, or the gamification. In our Seaside/ smalltalk workshop we use an example that looks a lot like it.

Stephan