The news has already been spreading around the blathosphere, but recently a website called Math Overflow modeled on Stack Overflow has opened up where anyone can post their mathematical questions. I would explain more, but the website is mostly self-explanatory.
MO couldn’t have come into existence at a better time for me. I’ve been carrying around a lot of questions I know someone should have an answer to, but I’ve never found a good way to ask them. For example, the conjecture I made at the end of my last post turned out to be a straightforward exercise in automaton theory. More generally I’m excited about the possibilities here in terms of improving the efficiency of mathematical research.
In other math-and-the-internet news, I have a Google Wave account, but (to my knowledge) nobody I do math with does! Hopefully this will be resolved eventually.
Annoying Precision 
I respectively disagree. I don’t think that asking questions and receiving valuable as well as efficient replies necessitates “userfriendliness” to the extent that everything is perfectly categorized or labeled as in MO.
Polymath, Good example; it’s an interesting experiment, I agree. But this could have been conducted on really any reasonable “communication platform” –> would it have been less effective if run on blogspot ? I doubt it. It just happened that wordpress was at this point a little more advanced in some features. In principle, the entire project could have been run on (or via) a newsgroup. WordPress is in principle nothing new; it all comes down to selling the same product but in a nicer outfit.
I accept your point on this.
not really; these sites become trendy for a while, then they lose their appeal after a while. it’s just like myspace -> blogspot -> wordpress …. google wave …. wat next?
the idea here is simple; if you wanted a productive (in terms of interactive) environment you could have easily used several math newsgroup forums that have been there long before your time. (I understand that this might seem rather archaic however they serve the exact same purpose.) Maybe for the new generation they don’t seem half as cool as they used to be for the older generation of mathematicians; but believe me, they are still alive and thriving.
Maybe this is biased, but sci.math.research, for example, seems a lot less user-friendly than MO even if it largely serves the same purpose. I don’t think one can underestimate the impact of WordPress as far as its role in Polymath, and blogging is very different from posting to a newsgroup. I also think that Google Wave offers significant benefits over technology that was available a decade ago (or even a year ago); it is most certainly not just hype.
Whoa! How did you get a Google Wave account? Is the Wave really cool, or is it just a lot of hype?
A friend of mine is a developer, so he sent me an invite; I’ve also been peeking at his sandbox account all summer. I haven’t really played around with it enough to be sure, but so far I think there is some real potential for Polymath.