There were a number of sites that were launched shortly after arc came out based on the news.arc code. The arc language and code are under the Artistic License 2.0 [1]. (I admit that I thought they were public domain) See arclanguage.org for more on news.arc and arc the language.
Here are the news.arc sites that I remember:
[newmogul.com] - by nickb was HN for business. I always assumed it was news.arc. Maybe not. Still worth reading up on. There were a number of HNers that used it regularly and were looking for another similar site when it went down.
[pageonetimes.com] - it was HN applied to sports.
[ballerinc.com] - I don't remember what that site specialized in.
All of these were based on the news.arc code. I don't think any of these are still around. But the news.arc code has continued to improve and become more stable so it may be viable option. So if you wanted to set up something for biology or medicine you could use the HN code and just customize it as you see fit. (Oh and put it behind apache, nginx, etc please, I can help just email me or ask over at arclanguage.org)
Good luck. I agree that if you can build the community and figure out how to get rid of bad data - it's a great idea.
I've been trying to pick up some of the newmogul.com community with http://newsley.com. It's my startup. It's not built using arc.news, however, I rolled my own using Django. And, while it's not up to arc.news functionality yet, it should be there pretty soon, and I plan on adding a bunch of new features in the coming months.
There's also http://markenomics.com that I believe is using arc.news for an economics/financial news site. The community isn't quite as active as it was a few months ago, however.
A stackoverflow for medicine could have enormous benefits, but considering how much "blind leading the blind" goes on there I'd be terrified if this is applied to a field with immediate consequences to people's well-being.
Agreed. Just looking at Yahoo! answers for any health related questions you can see that most people online don't know what they are talking about (but are more than happy to share) when it comes to health related issues.
Somehow the same people manage to stay off of programming sites thankfully and don't just go respond to everything saying, "Its probably a heart attack, get to your doctor!"
Yeah, that's definitely the risk, but I'd imagine community feedback + academic/clinical education/training would somewhat mitigate that, although not fully. A good verification system would help too (for physicians), but then it'd feel more like an invite-only community, which could be good or bad - I'm not sure.
A stackoverflow for researchers in biotech/medicine/biology would be extremely useful. In biological research, if someone wants to do an experiment that they are not experienced in, they can review peer-reviewed published materials, but many important details are left out. There are many matters of technique, and many decisions about which protocol/solution/tool/etc to use for the experiment that may not be easily accessible via published sources. In these situations, a well-connected biological researcher would ask a colleague who is experienced in the particular experiment. This is not always so easy though, and much time can be wasted re-discovering a simple issue that many others already knew.
In software, this kind of knowledge has been available online for years. In other technology fields, this is not the case. A easy-to-use, well designed forum like stackoverflow for biology research could be a real boon for the field. The only problem I see is getting people to use it.
If you want to get something up quick, you could use http://slinkset.com (aquired by Posterous in June 2009). It lets you create a social news site in seconds.
I would love this. Many times there are articles that would be more appropriate for that kind of forum, but I post them here to catch the hacker/biotech crossover crowd.
Here are the news.arc sites that I remember:
[newmogul.com] - by nickb was HN for business. I always assumed it was news.arc. Maybe not. Still worth reading up on. There were a number of HNers that used it regularly and were looking for another similar site when it went down.
[pageonetimes.com] - it was HN applied to sports.
[ballerinc.com] - I don't remember what that site specialized in.
All of these were based on the news.arc code. I don't think any of these are still around. But the news.arc code has continued to improve and become more stable so it may be viable option. So if you wanted to set up something for biology or medicine you could use the HN code and just customize it as you see fit. (Oh and put it behind apache, nginx, etc please, I can help just email me or ask over at arclanguage.org)
Good luck. I agree that if you can build the community and figure out how to get rid of bad data - it's a great idea.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) [2] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=7564
EDIT: Formatting ~ Sometimes I wish HN had markdown or textile...