Joseph Turian & co. at MetaOptimize have started a Q+A forum for “data geeks” – people in machine learning or data mining who deal with questions about visualizing, processing, or otherwise making sense of big data sets:
You and other data geeks can ask and answer questions on machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, text analysis, information retrieval, search, data mining, statistical modeling, and data visualization.
Here you can ask and answer questions, comment and vote for the questions of others and their answers. Both questions and answers can be revised and improved. Questions can be tagged with the relevant keywords to simplify future access and organize the accumulated material.
I’ve never been a forum participant, but finally, something I can use! This community was so spread out and disconnected that the best way to get advice about these topics used to be to walk up to one of your colleagues and hope they’d dealt with the same problem before. But, brought together by this forum, we can give each-other informative answers to obscure (but terribly-important-at-the-moment) questions about stuff we work on every day.
(Thanks to Flowing Data for the tip.)