New Food/Cooking Information Exchange website

[misstenacity]

Not sure what I think of this, but I'm generally a fan of "things Joel Spolsky", so when he started taking the formula that made his programming resource site successful to start new organic wiki-like forums, I took notice.

This is only one of at least a half-dozen subjects already, but it interests eGulleters, perhaps. :-)

http://cooking.stackexchange.com/

Probably overrun by noobs, but it could be a good resource after some time. You can answer questions, ask questions, check for questions that are not yet answered to jump in with help..... kind of like a competitor to Mahalo? Hmm.

[LindaK]

Interesting. Not very intuitive for a casual user but might improve over time. Worth following to see if it takes off.

[MaxH]

... Probably overrun by noobs, but it could be a good resource after some time. You can answer questions, ask questions, check for questions that are not yet answered to jump in with help.....

It's interesting; I've looked but not participated in it. I'm wondering, though, what really is new here, and the question has some history behind it.

The Q&A I saw on the new site looked like very typical food-forum questions. Answering questions, asking questions, etc as described above is a basic function of public online discussion fora such as eGullet. Fora of this type have existed continuously on the Internet since 1982 as I've mentioned before on eG (the oldest one still operates: the unmoderated public newsgroup rec.food.cooking, a type of forum that predates HTML tools). It's even argued sometimes that each new Q&A forum on a given topic splits and fragments public attention, causing more duplication of frequent topics that people could often answer for themselves by searching past discussions on an existing forum. eG itself, by its popularity and duration, has accumulated a certain body of information, and I'd rather steer curious people to such an existing data base than to a new forum where they'd re-invent the wheel.