Posts tagged Slashdot at Download Squad

Posts with tag Slashdot

Digg's failing democracy

Posted Oct 22nd 2007 12:00PM by Ian Smith
Filed under: Internet, Features, Social Software, Analysis, web 2.0

Digg has a problem. What was once a haven of obscure, insightful, and breaking news has become a cesspool of dated headlines, generic brand commentary, and fan-boy-blog spam. What happened? Why do the vast majority of front page links come from "popular" websites who feature a prominent "digg it" button on every article? Is there some conspiracy afloat? Is digg rewarding websites that send them a lot of traffic?

Can we demand a recount?

Sadly no. Digg's problem isn't one of cronyism or corruption, it is far worse. Digg has always been a poorly planned community. There, we said it.

To make matters worse, digg's phenomenal growth illustrates its own failure. If it were a nation, we would call it a failing state with a bumming population. A population easily and unwittingly manipulated by the craftiness of other large and powerful websites.

Need proof?

Of the 15 front page articles this morning:

7 were from popular blogs that featured the familiar "digg it" badge
5 were from popular sites that featured a prominent submit to digg button
2 were from popular mainstream news sites
1 was from a small town newspaper.

The problem really starts on the upcoming page. Here digg's increasing popularity attracts far more submissions than the diggers on the upcoming page can handle. A random check reveals 34 new links in the last two minutes. In another two minutes those links will be buried on the 4th or 5th page having never received a digg. A visit to page 40 in the upcoming queue reveals only one link that has garnered more than 3 diggs, and that link is from a popular website with the (you guessed it) digg it button at the top of the page.

How could this happen? Have diggers simply stopped caring about their own community?

Continue reading Digg's failing democracy

Slashdot lets users vote on stories with Firehose

Posted Aug 3rd 2007 4:00PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

Once upon a time, before Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and the relaunched Netscape, there was Slashdot. The original social news site for geeks allowed users to submit and share interesting articles with their peers back when Web 2.0 wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye.

While there's still an active community of Slashdot readers/commentors/submittors, the site's not resting on its laurels. This week, the site pushed its Firehose service into wider release.

What's Firehose? It's Slashdot's answer to the new crop of user generated news sites. It's basically Slashdot classic, but with voting. Each story has a + or - next to its headline. You can use the icons to vote a story up or down.

The stories are assigned a color based on their popularity. The top stories are red, and the least popular are black. You can use a color slider at the top of the page to filter the stories you see. And a Slashdot editor picks some of the hottest stories of the day to put on the front page. If you're a purist, you can skip the Firehose experience and continue visiting Slashdot's main page for your news unsorted by the wisdom of the masses.

[via Mashable]

MySpace News on its way

Posted Mar 9th 2007 4:00PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: News, Web services

First Reuters announces that it'll be launching a social news service similar to MySpace. Now it turns out MySpace is rumored to be working on a news service (that probably won't really compete head to head with Reuters).

The upcoming MySpace news venture will allow users to post news clips on their personal pages, share those clips with others, and rate and comment on others' news items. We're guessing you'll find much more entertainment and general interest new on MySpace than on tech-heavy sites like Digg and Slashdot.

MySpace News should launch within the next few months.

[via Webware]

Why digg is destined for failure

Posted Dec 11th 2006 11:00AM by Jason Clarke
Filed under: Developer, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software

If you've ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg's homepage, you've enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it's certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.

But how valuable is digg traffic, really, and is the digg community one that we should even care about? Unfortunately, after observing the digg community for about a year, I'd have to conclude no, it's not. Now, at this point I should point out that AOL owns Weblogs Inc, who own Download Squad, and AOL also owns Netscape, recently converted into a social news and media voting site that is in many ways similar to digg. So if you don't think I can be objective about this, you might want to just skip this post. But I'm not here to sing the praises of Netscape over digg either. Overall, I'm not certain that social media sites like Netscape, digg, reddit, del.icio.us, or even the granddaddy of them all - Slashdot - will have any relevance whatsoever in five years.

Okay, so now that I've condemned a whole class of website, or really a whole class of online community, I should point out that while digg drives the largest amount of traffic of the bunch, the community at digg is actually rotting from the inside out.

This is a very inflammatory statement to make, but all it takes is to browse through the comments on few random frontpage posts at digg, and you'll see what I mean. The sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming, and makes digg a place that is not only not fun to visit, it's certainly not a place to "share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you", as digg's tagline optimistically claims.

Continue reading Why digg is destined for failure

Mozilla developers interviewed on Firefox 2

Posted Nov 9th 2006 5:50PM by Jordan Running
Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Open Source

Over at Slashdot they're running an interview with Mozilla VP of Products Chris Beard about Firefox 2. The good thing about Slashdot's interviews is that the questions are chosen by the readers. Coincidentally, that's also the bad thing about Slashdot's interviews, because it means time gets wasted on questions like, "How was the cake from MS?" Anyway, it's not a terrible interview. Beard answers questions on Firefox's rendering speed as compared to IE7's ("we test every nightly build to make sure that we're getting faster, not slower than our previous releases"), standards and compatibility with IE ("We do our best to match IE's behavior. But we also realize that trying to be bug-for-bug compatible with IE is a dead end"), feature bloat ("Our community is surprisingly conservative, and we ask ourselves a lot of tough questions about whether or not a feature is really needed and used by a majority of users before we add it into Firefox."), and more. With Firefox's future growth uncertain in the face of IE7 and Vista, the interview is an interesting read.

Slashdot does social bookmarking

Posted Apr 13th 2006 3:10PM by Jordan Running
Filed under: Web services

Well, this is unexpected. Slashdot has launched a new social bookmarking feature a la del.icio.us. The new system has the requisite tagging, bookmarklet and Popular Bookmarks page, but beyond that it's very rudimentary—there's no way to browse by tags, for instance. Slashdot doesn't seem to be trying to take on del.icio.us, though. According to CmdrTaco, Slashdot Bookmarks "is primarily an extension of our submission bin ... our intent is that this system eventually be used to help us find content for the mainpage." He also says RSS feeds are coming, but just browsing the popular page I've already come upon some interesting links. It will be interesting to see whether Slashdot Bookmarks will take Slashdot in a similar direction to Digg, or if the editorial process will remain more or less unchanged.

Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner interviewed by Slashdot

Posted Jan 3rd 2006 2:35PM by Jordan Running
Filed under: Internet

Slashdot is running an interview with Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software. Overall it's pretty fluffy, but von Tetzchner does comment on the recent Microsoft acquisition rumors ("I would be disappointed if we were to end up in their hands and I find that very unlikely. I believe a lot of people at Opera would find them selves other work and that would include me."), their recent deal to make Google the default search in Opera, and open source ("I do not think that going open source would make us more efficient.").

Slashdot introduces day passes

Posted Dec 19th 2005 5:00AM by Jordan Running
Filed under: News

For the past couple years a subscription to Slashdot bought you a number of benefits, including being able to see stories 10 or 20 minutes before the non-paying public. This week Slashdot debuted a new feature that lets you watch a short advertisement in exchange for a free "day pass" that will let you see those stories from "The Mysterious Future." The day pass model has worked well for sites like Salon, but will it work for Slashdot?

Slashdot in 60 Seconds #2

Posted Sep 2nd 2005 1:19PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Internet, News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm

Here comes the second edition of Slashdot in 60 Seconds - a weekly roundup of all software-related news /. deemed fit for print this week. In case you missed last week's inaugural edition, check it out to get up to speed.

But without further interruption, here's the latest from /. from Saturday Aug. 27th - the morning of Friday Sept. 3rd:

Accused Zotob Worm Author Says Money Was Motive

The Massachusetts Office Party

Google Seeks to Develop Parallel Internet?

Continue reading Slashdot in 60 Seconds #2

#	Blogger	Posts	Cmts
1	Brad Linder	119	14
2	Joey Celis	47	0
3	Jay Hathaway	46	16
4	Drew Olanoff	30	25
5	Christina Warren	15	4
6	Lee Mathews	14	19
7	Kristin Shoemaker	14	12
8	Nancy Messieh	6	0
9	Danny Mendez	5	3
10	Emily Price	5	0
11	Todd Ritter	4	0
12	Alan Silcott	4	7
13	Adam Maras	4	1
14	Ian Dumych	3	1
15	Jason Clarke	3	0
16	Nik Fletcher	2	0
17	Gordon Finlayson	2	0
18	Dolores Parker	2	6
19	Patrick Beeson	2	5
20	Sue Polinsky	1	0

Japanese hardware sales, June 23 - June 29: Nineteen hundred and ninety-five edition Rumor: Rock Band 2 setlist reportedly discovered by two sources Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and the debut trailer	Flickr Find: Macintosh on Nintendo DS Ask TUAW: rEFIt with Open Firmware passwords, iCal problems, iPod without iTunes, and more Beefing up your Phishing net
Opera partners with Ask.com Facebook for Palm released, gives Centro users something to show off Truecrypt Updates to v6, Hides Your Subversive Plots Even Better!	LusoMotors LM23: 150hp, Honda CBR-powered track car Bugatti to release Veyron successor by 2012, considers racing program Spy Shots: 2010 Buick LaCrosse spotted in the wild
iRobot (still) working on lawn-mowing Roomba? New report says SSDs are, in fact, more efficient Study says more than 10,000 laptops go missing at US airports each week	Sony's Hancock wins holiday race Sunday Funnies: Business should have NBA type salary cap Las Vegas takes its lumps over the holiday weekend

Digg's failing democracy

Slashdot lets users vote on stories with Firehose

MySpace News on its way

Why digg is destined for failure

Mozilla developers interviewed on Firefox 2

Slashdot does social bookmarking

Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner interviewed by Slashdot

Slashdot introduces day passes

Slashdot in 60 Seconds #2

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