The popularity of the Internet was based on the communications of users from different areas in the world.  You can use publicly posted correspondence between users for research on problems that you may be working on.  Chances are if you are having a problem, someone else may have already been through the same situation.

There are two types of resources on the WWW for this.  Forums and Newsgroups.

Forum

An online discussion group. Online services and bulletin board services (BBS's) provide a variety of forums, in which participants with common interests can exchange open messages.  Src: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/f/forum.html 

Newsgroups
Same as forum, an on-line discussion group. On the Internet, there are literally thousands of newsgroups covering every conceivable interest. To view and post messages to a newsgroup, you need a news reader, a program that runs on your computer and connects you to a news server on the Internet. Src: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/n/newsgroup.html

Newsgroup Sources

http://groups.google.com/ (blocked by filter)

Screen capture from one of Google's news groups