Slashdot Mirror

There are several problems with this article.

First, all web sites are not the same. The author, Marshall Brain, is assuming that all web sites are like magazines or books. This isn't the case at all. Charging a penny for each use of google? Do I get charged to use the card catalog at the library? Web sites that do fit the magazine profile are experimenting with subscriptions. This will only be somewhat successful. I read salon, suck.com and others because it was a cheap way to kill time. I wouldn't buy subscriptions to paper versions of these sites, so I'm unlikely to buy a subscription to an electionic version.

Second, books are much more expensive to produce for the same audience size than web sites. I worked at O'Reilly and Associates, so I have a pretty good understanding of the number of folks involved in getting a book into your hot little hands. Think of the paper resources alone. The web just doesn't have the overhead. Did I hear someone cluck 'bandwidth'? Although it's not free (goddamn it), it's much cheaper per viewer than paper.

Third, most web content isn't worth a bucket of warm spit but you can't know this until you've spent a penny. Take Aliens, Aliens, Aliens. I'd never charge for that site. It's not worth it. It might give you a chuckle, but that's not worth copper.

Fourth, Brain posits that his scheme will greatly improve existing web sites like CNN and google. He's obviously glossing over that most folks won't bother visiting these places if each peak is $0.01. (What about caching these pages privately or in a p2p fashion for your friends? Robbing robbers doesn't seem so bad.)

But, there's a more important point: viewers make the site. Slashdot wouldn't be nearly as much fun without the trolls, pundits and occasional gurus. Search engines, as I've said before, are fools for trying to derive revenue from users. The users are adding value to their site. If those giant web indexes were data mined for corporate clients, google might rival IBM in revenue (certainly, they would be Very Well Off).

Fifth, the idea that experts will flock to the web if they can get paid for content is fatuous. Already, there are lots of gurus on the web now. There's no barrier to entry. Some guru's charge money and some don't. Brain's idea is that experts will set up a virtual consultancy on the web. Again, they can do that now. Look at e-diets.com. This idea isn't new and doesn't mean that every site needs to charge for content. Brain's scheme only works if *every* site does shakes down the reader.

Sixth, Brain's instant publishing with instant revenue for any individual who can access the web is a very naive and ill-conceived mantra. The beauty of the web is that absolute freaks can say outlandish things and we can read them for free. Through ISPs, we have already paid for admission into the carnival. Must we also for for each ride?

Last I heard, capitalism is about risk. You pays your money, you takes your chances. Corporate welfare for web sites is just nutty. There's absolutely no reason why crappy web businesses need to be succored; let them die.

Seventh, a penny per page adds up. What if I'm spidering a site? I'm going get creamed. Search engines need to do this and under this scheme I think all of them would go out of business. Further, as a web site owner, I *want* google, altavista, yahoo, etc to be spidering my site. That allows my content to be available to a wider audience. Why the hell would I penalize them?

Search engines made the web usable and free content made the web worth moving away from FTP. I'm a bit cranky from all the hand wringging from crappy, bloated web sites that can't turn a profit. I've seen many sites that do just fine. If you want to make it on the web, get some real content and try harder.

To listeners of the Art Bell show and to readers of Aliens, Aliens, Aliens, reports of artificial constructs on Mars is old hat. Richard Hoagland has been arguing the case for Mars for years. What's sort of interesting are remarks made by Arthur C. Clarke about those "crystal tubes". Add that to former government workers coming forward en masse claiming that the US government has a lot more information on extraterrial life that old videos of "Close Encounters", things are getting pretty interesting for UFOlogists.

Although am interested in SETI, Art Bell and all things alien, I'm far more concerned about what corporations and the government are doing to our human rights right now.

I'm sure whatever aliens arrive will be screwed in turn, just like the natives.

Bureaucracy is blind.

Please find another way to express your frustration. Headlines should express the flavor of a news item succinctly. Complainly childishly that others are complaining childishly to you doesn't help your case.

Maybe you, CmdrTaco, can write an OpEd piece instead explaining your editorial decisions. Lord knows I did for my site. That would be more effective, more fitting and better received than being cranking. Remember, you've got *a lot* of eyeballs looking at the front page. You can use this medium much more effectively.

I know that I would love to see more about how a site like slashdot works. What sort of tools did you use to create slashdot? Would you use them again? How are you going to handle scaling? What features would you like to add?

There are lots of ways to use Perl effectively to build and maintain sites. I used modules and mop_perl for my Aliens, Aliens, Aliens site. Most of the functionality comes from a single module which is used by various scripts which access particular tables.

However, if I had to build it again, I would have gone with HTML::Mason, which is a very powerful embedded perl system, like PHP, Cold Fusion, ASP, Zope, etc. It is open source and very nice if you already know Perl. If you don't, wouldn't Cold Fusion be the easiest embedded HTML language to use? Consider that Allaire is close to release CF for Linux. 8-)

In the end, any system which helps you the programmer separate form from functionality is the tool to use. The days of hard coding perl scripts to generate HTML are over, I hope.

I have to hand it ALL the slashdot gang for creating something truly unique: a community around a website. Sure, we've used BBSes and usenet, but I don't believe anyone has so successfully built a community using the web. Huzzah and kudos!

There's *a lot* of bitching here about the slow release of the next slashdot tarball. That's really unfortunate. Rob has already posted some code. You are welcome to fork the project.

Slashdot inspired me to rewrite and rework my tired old website into a weblog. Oddly enough, it too uses mysql and mod_perl. There is a great deal of customization that goes into creating your own "look and feel". Both slashdot and my code were designed to solve our *particular* problems. Aside from being examples of Perl code, you might be better served by looking a general web UI solutions that separate form from functionality. Like Zope or Mason. These are far better places to start than to rework code that was never designed to meet general problems.

Although I have GPL my code and even gotten a few people to use it, I realize that while what I have works for me, it's a better community service to show folks the Better Way. But hell, hack whatever you'd like (naked). :-)