From now on its Stack Exchange, a nod to the diverse portfolio of sites that have grown out of the original community of computer programers. 

"We were pretty sure that given the current market conditions, we could easily raise a big pile of new Unicorn-bucks without losing control of the company," wrote co-founder Joel Spolsky. "We made a few phone calls, took a few meetings, I flew to London and Boston, and hey presto, we sold another $12 million worth of the company to some great investors."

That's a bit of tounge in cheek banter on the current state of venture capital. The Observer has learned that SE still has plenty of money left over from its last round of funding. But with all the indicators pointing in the right direction now seemed like a good time for SE to bank for a rainy day. 

Answers are piling up about cooking, photography, even bike repair. In Area 51, where SE incubates new topics, firearms and music theory are closing in on public beta. 

Given that Silicon Valley Q&A site Quora has a valuation of $300 million -- and SE is bigger, faster growing and well capitalized -- some pundits are wondering if New York has a potential powerhouse on its hands. 

bpopper [a]t observer.com | @benpopper

Answer: Start a question and answer service. 

NY and NJ based Q&A app Opinionaided has just raised $1 million from General Catalyst, SoftBank Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson along with angel investors Mark Wachen of DreamIt Ventures and Jonah Goodhart of Point Ventures Group.

As the app's title implies, its not looking for factual answers, just opinions. Users can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to questions in the style of Hot or Not.

As any TV film critic or Roman gladiator will tell you, thumbs up and thumbs down are really the only responses you need to answer life's most important questions. For example, in response to the question "What's the best way to cure pneumonia?" Opinionaided users have voted two thumbs up, one thumb down and zero helpful answers of any sort at all.

It's possible that this app could be useful for getting the internet's opinion of whether or not those new jeans make you look fat, but for anything beyond that, the wisdom of the crowd seems like it may end up squandered. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Now New York Q&A site Stack Overflow is making it easier for programers feeling that seven year itch to head out for greener pastures by launching an updated jobs section today called Careers 2.0. 

"So, what we want is a way for people to be 'passively' looking for a job—they're willing to get an occasional offer from a company, even if they’re not actively looking for a job right now," wrote Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky.

The interesting thing about the job profiles on Stack Overflow is in place of the typical resume BS--skills and interests--users select what they consider to be the best answers they have provided to real technical questions on the site.

So for example, writes Spolsky, "You can search for Ruby on Rails programmers in Chicago, and we’ll find folks who have written highly scored Ruby answers on Stack Overflow."

In the new version of the careers site, job seekers will also get profiles free of charge. Access is by invite only and limited to the top rated users of Stack Overflow. The big money to be made is from charging $500 a week to employeers, who will now have a pre-screened pool of top talent as rated by their peers along with examples of their critical thinking in action.

No doubt a few awkward moments will arise in the next few months, as employers stumble on profiles of their developers "passively" searching for a better offers. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Over the past year, traffic to the Stack Overflow suite of Q&A sites has boomed from 7 million to 16 million. In part, this is because creators Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have created a community of experts, to the point where Stack Overflow is regularly cited in academic papers and used as a reference on resumes for programmers and engineers.

So when Messrs. Spolsky and Atwood noticed users on Stack Overflow sites dedicated to disparate topics like coding, cooking, grammar and geography were all debating what to do about softball queries, they decided to make a change.

"Do we really want to spoon-feed (or even encourage in any way) users so lazy they can’t find obvious Wikipedia pages? Or do even the most basic research before asking?" wrote Atwood in a blog post this morning. "Allow your Q&A community to fill itself with enough 'General Reference' type questions and you’ll soon find no experts there at all."

For those needding further clarification, they included this handy flow chart from user borroO. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Now this trove of knowledge will be integrated with upstart search engine Blekko, which is taking on giants like Google and Bing by offering users heavily curated results. 

Blekko's idea is to help users can cut down on spammy search results by adding "slash tags" to help sort the web. Users can sort by political fields like "liberal/conservative" or by verticals like "tech/sports."

Stack Overflow's army of power editors will now curate the results on programming-related slash tags like "Java" and "Linux." It's a welcome chance for many to earn reputation in a community that's become notoriously hard for newcomers to enter. 

"I'd be willing to help in the tags that I'm most active in," wrote user Tim Post. "I really like what Blekko is doing, and I love finding information that I need without having to sift through a mountain of crud."

Google is actually adopting a similar model, asking users to help it identify spammy sites it can block. But the Stack Overflow community is far more engaged and accurate than the masses on which Google is relying. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

The answers on Answers.com range from accurate to the patently ridiculous, drawing in more than 47 million unique visitors a month. "We're here to proudly proclaim that there is no such thing as a stupid answer," says the Answers.com blog. "Or is that a stupid question?"

Quora, the cool kid in the space, recently saw a surge in mainstream attention thanks to tech blogger Robert Scoble. GigaOm puts Quora's value at around $300 million based on investor interest. 

Meanwhile, New York's Stack Overflow has been crushing it, more than doubling in size during 2010 from seven million users to more than sixteen million.

Like Quora and Stack Overflow, Answers.com relies on its community of registered users to assess and improve the quality of its answers, which it matches with content from sources like Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary.

Here, in no particular order, are 13 of the questions and answers that earned Answers.com its nine-figure price tag. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

The intention was to cut down on spammy stuff created by content farms or scraped and repasted by SEO sites. 

It was big news because it coincided with the IPO of content farm king Demand Media, who specifically singled out changes to Google search as a threat to their company's bottom line. 

Today the change went into effect. In a blog post Cutts singled out Jeff Atwood and the folks at Stack Overflow for their help. 

Interestingly, this post clarified who the change will effect most. "The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content," wrote Cutts. 

That makes it seem like sites that repost aggregate content will be affected more than content farms like Demand Media which produce original, if low quality content. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Stack Overflow is primarily a message board where programmers can share tips and tricks and crowdsource solutions to problems they run into while coding. The name is a reference to a programming error.

Stack Overflow grew from seven million visitors to over 16 million in 2010, putting the site in Quantcast's top 400, CEO Joel Spolsky wrote in a blog post. The company raised $6 million from Union Square Ventures and angel investors last spring and went from three full-time employees to 27.

It's been so successful that the company launched several new sites in 2010, including a Q&A site for cooking, math, photography and English.

Over 80 percent of questions get a good answer, Mr. Spolsky wrote, and many of the new Stack Exchange sites have 100 percent answer rates. One of the issues with Quora, a well-funded Bay Area startup founded by former Facebook employees, is the high number of unanswered questions.

One way to solve this problem, Mr. Spolsky realized, was to separate Q&A sites by topic--that way each site attracts a more engaged group.

"We learned a long time ago that the only way to get questions answered promptly is to have a critical mass of knowledgeable users, so we have an onerous process called Area 51 where sites are proposed, discussed, and voted on. If a proposed site doesn't have critical mass, we just won't create it. Even if it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and quality or we'll close it down," he said.

Another New York company has had success by targeting developers--Forrst, which is like a Tumblr for programmers, has been growing rapidly since founder Kyle Bragger started it as a side project.

UPDATE: Mr. Spolsky pointed out on the tech news forum Hacker News that Quora and Stack Overflow are targeting different kinds of questions. "We're the reference section of the library, they're an awesome salon where smart people are shootin' the shit," he wrote. The questions on Stack Overflow and its associated sites are the sort of questions that have definite answers, like "Is there a word or phrase for the feeling you get after looking at a word for too long?" from the English Language & Usage site (answer: semantic satiation. Those questions can be found on Quora, too, but it also attracts questions with subjective answers, i.e. "What tech company will we all be talking about at SXSW 2011?"

Check out the 25 Most Popular Gawker User Passwords >>

adrjeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Answer: Not at all. Q & A sites are a kind of social network and a solution to problems with the Google's decreasingly-useful search engine. It's a crowded space--Tech Observer has receivered press releases this week from Ask.com, ChaCha and Answers.com, the last of which is relaunching soon.

Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow, the popular Q & A site for programmers, had some insight in his interview on We Are NY Tech this morning.

Spolsky also created Stack Exchange, a network of Q & A communities built around specific topics, like photography, cooking, gaming.

Any topic for which there is a scholarly journal merits a Q & A site, he said, pegging that number at between 20,000 and 40,000. "You need a minimum number of participants studying the same thing (400-500) which is about the same number as it takes to sustain a journal," he said.

The Q & A site Quora recently exploded, spreading from the earliest early adopters and taking hold with secondary early adopters (crucial group!) after being reviewed by tech blogger Robert Scoble, who gushed its praises. Two weeks later, the hype is still going.

Quora's innovation was to make answers not crap by requiring users to authenticate their names with Twitter or Facebook and having editors police content.

Spolsky's sites, due to their niche appeal, also filter out most of the Internet's trolls.

And if this whole Q&A thing doesn't pan out, Spolsky has a backup plan. "There isn't a single espresso shop on the Upper West Side that knows how to steam milk for lattes properly. I think at Starbucks they just put their face in the milk and blow bubbles," he said.

"I would open a cafe called the No Laptop Cafe. Hipsters pretending to write novels while they mull for six hours over one cup of brewed coffee would be banned. Instead, we would have real newspapers and folk singers."

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries