A Quantum Immortal

As you probably know, I joined the new wave and got my own Stack Exchange site. It’s really amazing how many different SE sites are emerging so rapidly. There’s a strong sense of (meta) community with most of the site owners heavily participating in discussions on meta stackexchange.

There is some overlap between different sites, but most sites I’ve seen are original and useful. The owner/s of one SE site have been nice enough to post links to other SE sites, including Draw3Cards, at the top of their homepage!

Today I convinced a friend at work to open his own website, and I think you should to – before all the good ones are taken. Come and join us, it’s really that easy.

For the last couple of days I’ve been obsessing over a new toy. Jeol & Jeff, the powers behind StackOverflow, have launched a public beta of StackExchange – a platform for hosting Q&A sites. Browsing the list of stack exchange sites, I saw several more and less successful sites, including:

• The (already-profiting) site on World of Warcraft (and site has barely been online for 2 weeks!)
• AskSci, in which I’ve been made moderator, but has been rather desolate since
• And MathOverflow, which seem to be already useful

I decided to try and open my own site, about Magic: The Gathering. The setup itself was rather easy. I:

• Bought a domain and set it up, with some help
• Seeded the site with some questions and answers
• Tweaked the color scheme, logo and favicon (thanks Eran)
• Got some friends to help out (though so far they’ve only posted answers, not questions)
• Setup Google Analytics, and noticed incoming search traffic only stayed for 42 seconds on the site
• Opened a small AdWords campaign, paying 1.5$ a day to test the water.
• Post the site on this blog, of course.

Now what remains to be seen is whether the site can accumulate the needed critical mass. For now, the site is in beta, meaning I don’t have to pay anything to keep it running (except time and effort). When the beta is over, the cost will be $129 a month, which is quite challenging to make using adsense.

Keep your fingers crossed for me 🙂

P.S.

Just got a $100 coupon for AdWords by visiting Google Webmasters Tools – how cool is that? In a second look, it appears the coupon was lying in my Webmasters Tools inbox for two months now, just waiting for the perfect opportunity.

I also forgot to mention opening a uservoice forum (+ adding the widget to my site).