Bits: Slashdot Founder Questions Crowdâs Wisdom
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The founder of Slashdot introduces a new Web service, Idle, and takes aim at a rival, Digg.
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I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
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Blog: CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says the fuzzy acceptance of "conversational marketing" is leading to confusion among blog readers. Isn't it time to set down clear rules of the road?
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I've been saying this ever since I started blogging.  When you have a product to announce, start a blog (if you don't already have one) and announce it. Before there were blogs, I wished Infoworld or PC Week would give space to the lead developer of the product, whether he or she is a marketer or technical, even the CEO if they wouldn't assign a former reporter or ad guy to write it, and tell us what you meant when you designed this product. Who were you thinking of and what would they do with it. And where does it go? What does 2.0 look like if it's 1.0 or 3.0 if it's 2.0.  I like it when people like Zuckerberg, Andreessen or Canter write a blog post that tells you without pulling any punches what the intent of the product is, in their own words. I'd like to hear what they said to the team that worked on it. I'd like to use my imagination. That's why I don't like Steve Jobs' keynotes, he's telling you what Eddie Haskell would say about the product to Mrs. Cleaver. You never get the intent when it's filtered by the press. And many of the people that call themselves bloggers, love them and bless them, aren't anything like bloggers, and they're everything like the bored hired writers that used to work at CNET and Fortune. In fact, many of them are exactly like them (because they are them).  We live in the age of DIY, that means if you have something to say, just say it. PS: Here's a picture of three child actors from Leave It To Beaver, taken when they're in their fifties. From left to right, Eddie Haskell, Beaver and Wally. Time Waits for No One.
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A curious network performance reduction noticed by many Windows Vista users of the 2CPU forum that became the talk of Slashdot last week has been identified as having been caused not by DRM, as Slashdot users expected, but by a curious prioritization "feature" of Vista that's intentionally biased toward Media Player at the expense of network and system resources.
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I&#8217;ve heard the warnings at conferences and especially in the Social Media Optimization field that spamming or multiple submissions to Digg and other social news sites could lead to the banning of that URL from future Digg listings. Seems that such a horrible fate was brought about on SearchBliss.com although they say that they were not [...]
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Did you notice that the last post by Mr. David Pasternack, titled &#8221; &#8220;Is SEO ârocket science?â: A Q&#38;A with Dave Pasternack&#8221; from January, 23rd has no comments? There is a friendly invitation reading &#8220;Click here to make a comment&#8221; at the end of the article, but nobody seemed to be willing to take advantage of [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Slashdot.org plans to release on Thursday a new feature designed to give more participation in the selection of articles to its users, who submit links to stories and comments about them to the site. Called Firehose, the new interface lets readers see, for the first time, all the news articles that flow into Slashdot for evaluation by the site's editors. Additionally, readers will be able to vote on whether specific articles should or shouldn't be featured on the site. "Before, if we chose not to post something, it was gone, and no one else saw it again," said Patrick McGarry, Slashdot project manager. Firehose will contain stories submitted for consideration by readers, as well as the content of automatic feeds. Readers will be able to tweak their Firehose view by filtering the contents using different parameters, and may opt to use Firehose as their main Slashdot interface. They will also be able to share their Firehose views with other users. However, despite the increased participation for readers, Slashdot editors will still have the last word on which stories are featured on the site's home page, McGarry said. "Anything going to the front page has to be vetted by an editor," he said. Anyone will be able to see the Firehose repository of submitted articles, but in order to vote on stories, users have to register with Slashdot. Registration is free. With these changes, Slashdot, which is part of OSTG Inc., is catching up to so-called "social news" features that have made sites like Digg Inc.'s Digg.com extremely popular. Digg has increased its popularity significantly in the past year, according to Web measurement statistics from Hitwise Pty. Ltd. For the week ending Feb. 24, Digg ranked first in Hitwise's IT News and Media category with 10.8 percent of visits to sites in this category, while Slashdot grabbed 22nd place with 0.75 percent. A year earlier, in the week ending Feb. 25, 2006, Digg ranked in sixth place with almost 4 percent of visits, while Slashdot had the 11th spot with 1.33 percent. Others that have seen Digg take market share away are PC World and Cnet, which ranked first and second, respectively, in this category, in the week ending Feb. 25, 2006. That week, PC World had 9.5 percent of visits, and in the comparable week this year it had fallen to third place with 6.7 percent. Cnet had 9.28 percent and kept its second place in the comparable week this year, albeit with a smaller 6.8 percent share. (PC World is owned by IDG, the parent company of IDG News Service.)
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Aaron Wormus has a new posting on his weblog pertaining to the Dangers of SQLite Ignorance.
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You think that things will become a bit normal again after the flood of posts all over the internet after David Pasternack&#8217;s 3rd negative post about SEO, just to getÂ &#8221;stabbed&#8221; from yet another side. I won&#8217;t link to the post by Jason Calcanis and add to the number of inbound links to his blog to play [...]
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Dare Obasanjo works at Microsoft.  In his blog post about the Yahoo layoffs, in a postscript, he indicates that Microsoft is interested in creating a Twitter clone.  I've said openly, on Twitter (and now here) that I would like to be part of a venture that aims to create a scalable Twitter. I've had several conversations with people who are attempting to do this. I haven't done a deal yet. My bet: There will be a lot of growth in Twitter in the coming years, and it seems likely that the Twitter company will not be able to scale their systems to meet the demand. There are features that should have been in the product and in the API months ago that are on the back-burner, likely due to Twitter's constant battle to meet meet demand (scaling). As a user, I'd like to view the product and the company as a black box, but that's impossible with the system glitches and outages. What users are doing now with Twitter is far more important, imho, than the servers, or the company. The company, understandably, thinks their issues are most important, but that's a matter of perspective. We don't own any stock in the company, so our perspective reflects that. To us, they're a utility. All this is a verbose way of saying that Microsoft applying their resources and scaling knowhow to this problem woud be an interesting development.
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BERKELEY, California  - Internet culture, often portrayed as the vanguard of progress, is actually a jungle peopled by intellectual yahoos and digital thieves, according to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-dissenter.
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This is the question posed by Will Hurley of BMC.  After chatting with him today about life, the upcoming elections, and the open source community in general, I decided that I am pretty curious about how to answer that question myself. read more
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I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.
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Sam blogs about his wiki spam problems  and implements a posting throttle.  With new spam-capable zombie PCs and with wikis that aren't updated very often this isn't a solution.  If I were to go back to my wiki after a month it would be covered with spam links.  One strong solution is emergent and distributed social whitelists (AKA my FOAFKey  proposal).  With a FOAFKey enabled wiki/weblog you could allow a whitelist of a few hundred thousand users to post to the wiki without any problems.  All they would need to enter is their email address for confirmation (or the SHA1 hash of their email).  For the rare times when the user isn't within the original whitelist we can just have the user uplo ...
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Don Reisinger thinks a digg rebellion may be in the works.  But as he points out, a subset of individuals aren't enough to bring the site down.
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Do you suffer from no-links angst too? Aaron Pratt of SEO Buzz Box writes about &#8220;circular linking patterns&#8221; and how A-list bloggers form their own &#8216;link cliques&#8216; and eschew their own advice of linking out to quality content for the sake of some friendly backscratching. He&#8217;s talking about the &#8216;elite&#8217; SEO bloggers and I think it would [...]