SKILLSHARE EVERYWHERE. Skillshare had two big announcements yesterday: 1) the democratized education platform is available in "every major city" in the U.S. now, and 2) CEO Mike Karnjanaprakhorn has been named one of 12 TED fellows in 2012.

FORRST RANGERS. The developer community Forrst has started posting jobs. Bring it on, Stack Overflow.

SAVE AMIT. The campaign for Amit Gupta continues! Upcoming: bone marrow drive in Delhi and swabbing party in Somerville and much, much more.

DREAM TEAM. New Work City is joining forces with the hackers of NYC Resistor to cross-promote events. Synergy!

XX INNOVATION LUNCH. "I’m super psyched for my lunch this Friday," Charlie O'Donnell wrote in his newsletter this week.  "Marissa Campise from Venrock and Sarah Tavel from Bessemer are co-hosting a lunch with me for up and coming women entrepreneurs to get a chance to meet venture investors."

CLINGLE! "It’s time to Clingle! MyCityWay, developer of the popular urban city apps has launched Clingle, a first-of-its-kind personalized mega-utility location-based social network ... What is Clingle? Clingle is a social network that connects people with their friends and the world around them. One of the most unique features of Clingle are 'Clings'--personal messages (text, pictures, audio and coming soon, video) that can be left for friends at favorite locations, and only unlocked by them when they check-in. The app is brought to you by the same team who created MyCityWay, a BMW iVenture backed and 2009 NYC Big Apps award-winning app. The free app can be downloaded from the iTunes store at: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clingle/id449924410?mt=8.

ADD TO NESTIO. Nestio.com, a real estate listings manager, a week ago launched support for nationwide listings  and announced a partnership with eBay to include "add to Nestio" buttons on every listing.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Wanderfly is a year old and has "inspired 4 million trips with users from 217 countries, won a Webby nomination, Top 10 Startup by Time Inc. & Top 100 Brilliant Companies by Entrepreneur, and launched our recommendation technology on 1000 NYTimes.com pages." And made themselves a birthday infographic.

IMMACULATE LAUNCH. "Over the last two and a half years, a community of like minded individuals in good taste has formed around Immaculate Infatuation. Co-founded by Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal, two music business executives, Immaculate Infatuation has become NYC's go-to resource for honest, no bullsh*t restaurant reviews." Coolio and Gary Vaynerchuk are users.

MONIES. "OpenSky.com, the shopping destination that allows members to design their ideal shopping experience curated by some of the world’s most interesting people, today announced it has secured $30 million financing from new and current investors.  New investor Providence Equity Partners led the financing, which included participation from existing investors Highland Capital Partners, Canaan Partners and The Raine Group."

"GramercyOne is developer of cloud-based booking, business management, and marketing software used by more than 2500 businesses worldwide.Today, we’re announcing that the company has raised $14.5 million in Series A funding round led by Revolution Ventures (chaired by AOL founder Steve Case)."

TECHIES FOR CHARITY. A formal group of NYC technology and advertising executives will run the New York City Marathon on November 6 and raise money for Camp Interactive, "a 10-year-old non-profit that exposes inner-city kids to both technology and the outdoors that is very active here in NYC." The Team InterActive NYC Marathon team consists of: Matt Siegel, COO and Co-Founder of IndabaMusic; Toby Daniels, CEO of Crowdcentric; Peter Miron, CTO of Knewton; Michelle DeForest, Director of Marketing and Strategy at DOTGO; David Pashman, Legal Team Leader at Meetup; James Cooper, Chief Creative Innovation Officer at JWT and more. "As of October 24, the team has raised more than $47,000 for the organization and hopes to bring in $100,000 total."

WE ARE ALL A VC. On Thursday, a meetup for readers of the Fred Wilson blog.

WHO'S HIRING? RollingStone.com listed a job in this week's Inside Startups newsletter--but it's not for a developer. Want to be a national director of digital ad sales? "Candidate will be a seasoned sales executive who will execute an aggressive growth plan to grow the overall digital business."

Stack Exchange and Facebook announced a partnership today--facebook.stackoverflow.com, a Facebook-centric forum embedded within Stack Overflow's programming-focused, question-and-answer wiki--and there was much rejoicing.

"It came about very quickly," said Alex Miller, director of strategy at Stack Exchange, the network of wiki-esque forums that includes Stack Overflow. (Mr. Miller is also chief of staff and "sidekick to the CEO," Joel Spolsky, who is on vacation this week and was unavailable. He also holds more than a dozen other titles for which he has corresponding business cards, according to his various duties. Betabeat can empathize.)

"One of the joys of us being a small agile start-up is, we can do things very quickly," Mr. Miller explained. "In late June, early July they approached us and basically initiated a discussion about ways for us to partner on it. They were looking for a new solution and recognized the value of the platform ... we were obviously thrilled to work with them."

Stack Overflow was already serving as an official forum for Android developers, with Google sponsoring the Android tag on posts. Perhaps that's how Facebook got the idea of moving the official Facebook developer forum, a standard thread-based community with which many developers were frustrated, onto Stack Overflow.

The Facebook forum is basically a curated mini-site within the Stack Overflow site, where the more than 10,000 posts about Facebook that had already amassed have been curated into a coherent destination, with a few extra features for usability, Mr. Miller said.

The advantage for Facebook developers on the new curated mini-site is that their questions are also seen by the Stack Overflow community at large--so if it turns out the problem isn't with the Facebook API, but with something in the underlying code, a befuddled developer can still get an answer.

This is a new product offering for Stack Exchange, but Mr. Miller hesitated to call it a potential revenue stream. The revenue comes from its careers mini-site, he says, which has grown explosively since its launch a few months ago at the LAUNCH conference in San Francisco. He sounded very happy with the Careers 2.0 revenue, which he says is mutually beneficial to both job seekers and employers. It's a positive feedback loop you don't find with other revenue possibilities such as advertising. With a jobs site, more users leads to more job postings which leads to more users, he said--whereas ads can really either be optimized for advertisers, making the user experience worse and vice versa.

Still, Mr. Miller noted, don't be surprise if you see more mini-sites come out in the coming months. Stack Exchange doesn't have anything specific planned, but there's been interest. "All of our sites have launched based on community demand and support," he said. "As the community asks for more ... I'm sure we'll roll out more in the future."

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

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 aprogramming 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 forcooking, 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 hisinterview 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