biztravel is mostly intended so that I could dogfood StackExchange (http://stackexchange.com), which is our white label version of the code that runs StackOverflow.com. StackExchange is currently in invite-only beta. I didn't really expect to get a critical mass of road warriors on that site since I'm not planning to spend very much effort promoting it, but I am interested to see how small a StackOverflow-like knowledge exchange site can be and still get enough traffic to work.
Someone, I'm sure, will take travel Q&A far more seriously than I did, and get someone like Rick Steves or a big travel site like Orbitz or TripAdvisor behind it, and that'll be huge. Either way I'm pretty confident that Jeff Atwood's goal of having knowledge exchanges like StackOverflow replace crappy old PHPBB sites everywhere on the Internet is pretty much inevitable and this will be a huge opportunity to create new communities where old entrenched ones used to be locked in.
Yeah it will take off, but the discussion aspect may need work for certain communities (one example crafts, see crafster).
I can think of these sites I'd visit:
Car repairs/advice,
Graphic Design,
Business advice (freelanceswitch will probably be someone to approach),
Marketing,
Maths,
Food/Cooking/Recipes,
Cocktail Mixing
Sites that will work:
Crafts,
ESL,
Athlete/professionals training advice
The pricing will need to drop for smaller communities to make the port, and include a donations feature to help communities fund themselves.
Just realized, I'm actually asking a question here.. how would you kick off one of these sorts of sites if you wanted it to become popular? Pre-populate it with a fake community? Get a group of friends to use it in anger?
The remants of StackOverflow are kind of an important issue. The guy raises good questions (how do I post maps (say Google Maps) or do other industry specific stuff) and brings up good points about how applicable some stuff is to non-programming sites.
If they haven't done it already, I expect a Wordpress style "plugin" system could cater for all this if.... it were an open source (or even self hosted) app. Except, it ain't and I can only see "enterprise" customers finding this app any way attractive.
Interesting pricing model. No free option and a premium (per-server based) model for on premise. Very different from what you usually see for web-based services. I think it might work.
Dharmesh, the free option in a freemium model usually exists to spread the word, but we have StackOverflow.com to spread the word. And most of these sites people are building will have big audiences, and those audiences are getting it free, so we don't really need a free entry-level option just to get our first customers.
It's partly the framework, and partly because Joel threw this together on a Friday afternoon. The only thing customized on this site is the colors and the logo, but you can also add blocks of HTML in a bunch of places where ads are usually shown.
Anything in particular? As Joel said, this is mostly a beta testing site, but feedback on the colors would be useful for picking some nice preset color schemes.
That blue used for backgrounds (i.e. the login box) is a bit too saturated and dark. Coupled with the dark blue text, they fail in colour contrast checks http://skitch.com/dylanfm/b6nj6/colour-contrast-analyser .
I suggest knocking it back to something like #B5D2E4. The greens for answered questions are a bit dark too and could be changed to #afff4b for accepted answers and #D1FF7E for answered. Here's a screenshot with those colours firebugged in http://skitch.com/dylanfm/b6nk3/biztravel .
Someone, I'm sure, will take travel Q&A far more seriously than I did, and get someone like Rick Steves or a big travel site like Orbitz or TripAdvisor behind it, and that'll be huge. Either way I'm pretty confident that Jeff Atwood's goal of having knowledge exchanges like StackOverflow replace crappy old PHPBB sites everywhere on the Internet is pretty much inevitable and this will be a huge opportunity to create new communities where old entrenched ones used to be locked in.