I just checked my feeds and noticed that today is the day that Stack Overflow goes into public beta. It is a fascinating experiment that will hopefully solve many of the problems we developers face i.e. finding comprehensive answers to coding questions.

I rely heavily on Google search to push the boundaries of my knowledge base and while Google lands you in the right spot with all the appropriate keyword being accounted for, the veracity and quality of the answers remain in question. Stack Overflow is cool because the community vets and votes on the answers, as Joel suggests:

"Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers."

Head over to Stack Overflow, you will be required to create and OpenID to make contributions.