Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Slashdot Article For Class
Slashdot.org: Land of the Geek, Home of the Nerd
Among forms of human communication, arguing via the internet currently ranks somewhere below smoke signals on a foggy day.
At Slashdot.org, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda and his fellow administrators are making a valiant attempt to raise the level of online discourse.
Slashdot provides a wide-ranging forum for conversation on everything from national politics to “What’s New With Data Structures In C#.”
Users submit stories to Slashdot by the hundreds every day. The administrators sift through the submissions, choosing about twelve a day to post on the front page.
Nearly all of the articles posted on Slashdot are open to public feedback and discussion. Any reader may post a comment, but that does not mean that anyone wants to read what they have to say.
To deal with this common problem in online forums, the administrators of Slashdot allow certain moderators to assign a numerical rating to each comment. A particular comment might be rated as high as “5: Insightful” or as low as “-1: Off Topic.” The points add up. Users hoard their “karma” points as a badge of honor.
Slashdot commands so large a following that when a story links to a smaller web site, the huge number of hits can crash an unprepared server. This has become known as the “Slashdot Effect.” The victims are said to have been “Slashdotted.”
Slashdot was created by geeks, for geeks. Along with Jeff “Hemos” Bates, Malda founded Slashdot in September 1997. According to Malda, the site was named Slashdot because he “wanted to make the URL silly and unpronounceable.” Malda encourages doubters to “[t]ry reading out the full URL to http://slashdot.org and you'll see what I mean.”
The white and green Slashdot home page looks like a throwback to the early 1990s, reminiscent of early local online bulletin board systems.
Icons at the top of the page indicate the categories of the most recent stories. At the moment, an illustration of Justice leads the pack, blindfold and all, pointing to a story in the “Your Rights Online” section.
A powerful tool for Slashdot users hides beneath the link to “Ask
Slashdot.” “Ask Slashdot” masquerades as an advice column, but it reads more like the “Playboy Advisor” for geeks than “Dear Abby.”
The questions themselves range from the inane “Pimpin’ Out Your Corporate Office” to the altruistic “Technology
To Help With Learning Disabilities.”
Many of the replies will fall short of the questioner’s expectations, but somewhere buried under the mountain of inside jokes and historical computer references, the answer will appear.
Open Source Technology Group (OSTG) has owned Slashdot since October 2000, taking over the management of the servers and advertising. In addition to Slashdot, OSTG owns sites such as Linux.com and SourceForge.net, gathering points for developers of open-source software.
Malda, Bates, and their team are now free to spend their time editing content for Slashdot and developing software of their own.
According to web traffic monitor Alexa.com, Slashdot has averaged a ranking of 1244 over the last three months, increasing by 259 places over the same time period. In that span of time, Slashdot has also increased its page views and reach.
Because Alexa depends on “traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users,” their calculations may be underestimating the usage of Slashdot. The Alexa Toolbar is available only to users of Internet Explorer on a Microsoft Windows operating system. No scientific poll exists, but the anti-Microsoft mood that prevails at Slashdot might indicate that the Alexa Toolbar goes ignored by Slashdot users.
According to Alexa, CNET.com tops Slashdot on all fronts. CNET ranks 210, with larger percentage increases in all categories over a three month period. CNET is a commercial site, offering price
comparison of products, splashy color advertising, and high quality visual design. CNET has articles, reviews, and columns such as “Most Popular Buzz” and “Ask the Cell Phone Diva.”
In contrast, Slashdot is the low-tech leader with a writing style that resembles the signature pages in a high school yearbook. CNET exudes slick gadgetry, trumpeting the release of the newest digital cameras. Slashdotters argue over the faults of the latest Linux kernel.
Slashdot’s low-tech exterior, greatly unchanged since 1997, represents its traditional nerd aesthetic. It might be a little hard on the eyes and annoying to listen to for long periods of time, but Slashdot excels as the primary source for “[N]ews for nerds, stuff that matters.”
Among forms of human communication, arguing via the internet currently ranks somewhere below smoke signals on a foggy day.
At Slashdot.org, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda and his fellow administrators are making a valiant attempt to raise the level of online discourse.
Slashdot provides a wide-ranging forum for conversation on everything from national politics to “What’s New With Data Structures In C#.”
Users submit stories to Slashdot by the hundreds every day. The administrators sift through the submissions, choosing about twelve a day to post on the front page.
Nearly all of the articles posted on Slashdot are open to public feedback and discussion. Any reader may post a comment, but that does not mean that anyone wants to read what they have to say.
To deal with this common problem in online forums, the administrators of Slashdot allow certain moderators to assign a numerical rating to each comment. A particular comment might be rated as high as “5: Insightful” or as low as “-1: Off Topic.” The points add up. Users hoard their “karma” points as a badge of honor.
Slashdot commands so large a following that when a story links to a smaller web site, the huge number of hits can crash an unprepared server. This has become known as the “Slashdot Effect.” The victims are said to have been “Slashdotted.”
Slashdot was created by geeks, for geeks. Along with Jeff “Hemos” Bates, Malda founded Slashdot in September 1997. According to Malda, the site was named Slashdot because he “wanted to make the URL silly and unpronounceable.” Malda encourages doubters to “[t]ry reading out the full URL to http://slashdot.org and you'll see what I mean.”
The white and green Slashdot home page looks like a throwback to the early 1990s, reminiscent of early local online bulletin board systems.
Icons at the top of the page indicate the categories of the most recent stories. At the moment, an illustration of Justice leads the pack, blindfold and all, pointing to a story in the “Your Rights Online” section.
A powerful tool for Slashdot users hides beneath the link to “Ask
Slashdot.” “Ask Slashdot” masquerades as an advice column, but it reads more like the “Playboy Advisor” for geeks than “Dear Abby.”
The questions themselves range from the inane “Pimpin’ Out Your Corporate Office” to the altruistic “Technology
To Help With Learning Disabilities.”
Many of the replies will fall short of the questioner’s expectations, but somewhere buried under the mountain of inside jokes and historical computer references, the answer will appear.
Open Source Technology Group (OSTG) has owned Slashdot since October 2000, taking over the management of the servers and advertising. In addition to Slashdot, OSTG owns sites such as Linux.com and SourceForge.net, gathering points for developers of open-source software.
Malda, Bates, and their team are now free to spend their time editing content for Slashdot and developing software of their own.
According to web traffic monitor Alexa.com, Slashdot has averaged a ranking of 1244 over the last three months, increasing by 259 places over the same time period. In that span of time, Slashdot has also increased its page views and reach.
Because Alexa depends on “traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users,” their calculations may be underestimating the usage of Slashdot. The Alexa Toolbar is available only to users of Internet Explorer on a Microsoft Windows operating system. No scientific poll exists, but the anti-Microsoft mood that prevails at Slashdot might indicate that the Alexa Toolbar goes ignored by Slashdot users.
According to Alexa, CNET.com tops Slashdot on all fronts. CNET ranks 210, with larger percentage increases in all categories over a three month period. CNET is a commercial site, offering price
comparison of products, splashy color advertising, and high quality visual design. CNET has articles, reviews, and columns such as “Most Popular Buzz” and “Ask the Cell Phone Diva.”
In contrast, Slashdot is the low-tech leader with a writing style that resembles the signature pages in a high school yearbook. CNET exudes slick gadgetry, trumpeting the release of the newest digital cameras. Slashdotters argue over the faults of the latest Linux kernel.
Slashdot’s low-tech exterior, greatly unchanged since 1997, represents its traditional nerd aesthetic. It might be a little hard on the eyes and annoying to listen to for long periods of time, but Slashdot excels as the primary source for “[N]ews for nerds, stuff that matters.”
Monday, February 14, 2005
Scoble Paper For Class
Robert Scoble on the Blogosphere, Journalism, and Credibility
The “disintermediation of media” has arrived in the form of the blog, according to Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist for Microsoft. Scoble chronicles evolving technology at his Scobleizer blog, where he manages to humanize Microsoft while encouraging discussion of the big ideas bouncing around the blogosphere every day.
Until recently, mass media was the chief interpreter of the world. If a person wanted information, he turned on CNN, picked up the New York Times, or tuned into NPR. All that has changed. Today’s news consumer can consult an infinite number of information sources. The blog has transcended its diary format and become a method to communicate human opinion in a public space. The interactive structure of the blog, allowing for instant feedback from the reader, has torn open the fabric of discourse. Ideas evolve in real time, jumping from blog to blog as memes that mutate and are interpreted as they move in viral patterns. The blog has made it difficult for the mass media to mediate information.
At a recent talk at SJSU, Scoble elaborated on this ongoing disintermediation. Understanding that journalism is a business, one can see the parallels of how the blog affects both corporations and traditional news sources. The immediacy of the blog has shrunk the space between the reader and the story. Information flows from the source: bloggers on the scene changed the way news was dispersed from the disasters of September 11th and the Asian tsunami. Without the gate keeping of traditional news media, all stories are published. Bloggers might prioritize different details of a story than a city editor would, but the editor no longer gets a choice. The only limits on the blogger are self-enforced.
Although there are examples of extremist bloggers, this only proves that there is an audience for everyone. That audience might be small or large, as in the case of Scoble, who ranks among the top 100 blogs at Technorati, a noted site that practices the tagging and taxonomy of the web. Scoble cites “linking behavior” as the method for establishing credibility. A blog is only as reliable as its inbound links; when a large number of people use a particular blog as a reference point, they confer credibility on the blogger. The audience is the evidence. Scoble expects that readers will “triangulate in on the truth” when there is any doubt as to the veracity of a story or the credibility of a source. The blogosphere corrects itself: the sheer number of readers and writers on any given topic makes it difficult to be wrong for long about anything.
This abundance of information can appear overwhelming to the reader at first, but new technologies such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feed aggregators simplify the process. When a reader subscribes to an RSS feed, he commands his computer to automatically download the headlines and sometimes the entire entries of a given blog. These feeds constantly update themselves and are distributed into categories of his choosing. The resulting page aggregates the news: the reader gathers many sources of information into one document, cutting his news reading time exponentially. Scoble subscribes to over 1200 feeds.
Increased access to information makes for smarter readers of news and smarter consumers of products. Traditional news organizations and corporations are both struggling to keep up with the pace of the online word-of-mouth network. In recent months, bloggers have beaten traditional journalists and corporations to the punch on stories like Rathergate, Kryptonite’s ball-point pen problem, and CNN executive Eason Jordan’s statements about the U.S. military targeting journalists.
Bloggers are driving a tighter news cycle, forcing the mainstream media and corporations to enter the online foray themselves. Enter Robert Scoble. The Economist magazine this week called him Microsoft’s “Chief Humanizing Officer.” He does humanize a monolithic corporation, but he also acts as Microsoft’s good cop, their man on the street, the guy who will set things straight in the blogosphere, whether he is evangelizing the use of Tablet PCs or discussing what is acceptable to talk about in a corporate blog. He speaks honestly, avoids corporate doubletalk, and as a result, Scoble has earned the respect of thousands of readers. The Economist raises the question of whether this is the death knell of conventional corporate communications. As blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine commented, “[I]f you actually tell the truth to people, you don’t have to spend on spin.”
technorati tag: scoble
The “disintermediation of media” has arrived in the form of the blog, according to Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist for Microsoft. Scoble chronicles evolving technology at his Scobleizer blog, where he manages to humanize Microsoft while encouraging discussion of the big ideas bouncing around the blogosphere every day.
Until recently, mass media was the chief interpreter of the world. If a person wanted information, he turned on CNN, picked up the New York Times, or tuned into NPR. All that has changed. Today’s news consumer can consult an infinite number of information sources. The blog has transcended its diary format and become a method to communicate human opinion in a public space. The interactive structure of the blog, allowing for instant feedback from the reader, has torn open the fabric of discourse. Ideas evolve in real time, jumping from blog to blog as memes that mutate and are interpreted as they move in viral patterns. The blog has made it difficult for the mass media to mediate information.
At a recent talk at SJSU, Scoble elaborated on this ongoing disintermediation. Understanding that journalism is a business, one can see the parallels of how the blog affects both corporations and traditional news sources. The immediacy of the blog has shrunk the space between the reader and the story. Information flows from the source: bloggers on the scene changed the way news was dispersed from the disasters of September 11th and the Asian tsunami. Without the gate keeping of traditional news media, all stories are published. Bloggers might prioritize different details of a story than a city editor would, but the editor no longer gets a choice. The only limits on the blogger are self-enforced.
Although there are examples of extremist bloggers, this only proves that there is an audience for everyone. That audience might be small or large, as in the case of Scoble, who ranks among the top 100 blogs at Technorati, a noted site that practices the tagging and taxonomy of the web. Scoble cites “linking behavior” as the method for establishing credibility. A blog is only as reliable as its inbound links; when a large number of people use a particular blog as a reference point, they confer credibility on the blogger. The audience is the evidence. Scoble expects that readers will “triangulate in on the truth” when there is any doubt as to the veracity of a story or the credibility of a source. The blogosphere corrects itself: the sheer number of readers and writers on any given topic makes it difficult to be wrong for long about anything.
This abundance of information can appear overwhelming to the reader at first, but new technologies such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feed aggregators simplify the process. When a reader subscribes to an RSS feed, he commands his computer to automatically download the headlines and sometimes the entire entries of a given blog. These feeds constantly update themselves and are distributed into categories of his choosing. The resulting page aggregates the news: the reader gathers many sources of information into one document, cutting his news reading time exponentially. Scoble subscribes to over 1200 feeds.
Increased access to information makes for smarter readers of news and smarter consumers of products. Traditional news organizations and corporations are both struggling to keep up with the pace of the online word-of-mouth network. In recent months, bloggers have beaten traditional journalists and corporations to the punch on stories like Rathergate, Kryptonite’s ball-point pen problem, and CNN executive Eason Jordan’s statements about the U.S. military targeting journalists.
Bloggers are driving a tighter news cycle, forcing the mainstream media and corporations to enter the online foray themselves. Enter Robert Scoble. The Economist magazine this week called him Microsoft’s “Chief Humanizing Officer.” He does humanize a monolithic corporation, but he also acts as Microsoft’s good cop, their man on the street, the guy who will set things straight in the blogosphere, whether he is evangelizing the use of Tablet PCs or discussing what is acceptable to talk about in a corporate blog. He speaks honestly, avoids corporate doubletalk, and as a result, Scoble has earned the respect of thousands of readers. The Economist raises the question of whether this is the death knell of conventional corporate communications. As blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine commented, “[I]f you actually tell the truth to people, you don’t have to spend on spin.”
technorati tag: scoble
