Slashdot Mirror

Several readers sent us notice of an article in the Wall Street Journal in advance of the tenth anniversary of the blog (by some definitions and accounts). The Ur-blogger in this version of history was Jorn Barger and the blog was Robot Wisdom. Barger wrote, "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff." The Journal article has statements from a baker's dozen of bloggers and/or blogwatchers and a handful of videos of bloggers talking about how and why they do what they do.

RobotWisdom asks: "Is there a wiki somewhere that I haven't found, dedicated to cataloging all the technological innovations imagined by science fiction writers? So that if someone wants to explore a particular class of innovation like weapons, or medical, or transportation, they can (eventually) easily find summaries of all the major thinking on that topic? And if it hasn't been started yet, does anyone have the wherewithal to start it?" If such a thing isn't available in one place, what sites have you found that catalog the technology of specific sci-fi mythologies?

RobotWisdom writes "The new New Yorker magazine has posted two long non-technical articles about the Chudnovsky brothers and their homebrew supercomputers. One is a 1992 article about how they calculated pi to over two billion decimal places using a $70,000 cluster with 16 nodes. The other is a brandnew piece about how they spent months creating a seamless multi-gigabyte image of a fifteenth century tapestry for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tapestries are essentially pixel-art on a non-rigid (cloth) matrix, so the manual labor of photographing it inch by inch had introduced many tiny deformations in the images, which they had to mathematically iron out. Old lo-res pix of the tapestries are on the Met's site, pix of the brothers are in the world brain."

RobotWisdom writes "Alice of the Wonderland weblog has managed to transcribe and post the opening keynote address by Raph Koster from the Game Developers' Conference. It was based on his book, 'A Theory of Fun'. My favorite quotes: 'Fun is the feedback the brain gives while successfully absorbing a pattern.' and 'The differences between Cheers, Friends, and a medieval morality play are NOT THAT BIG.' Very upbeat, thought-provoking and inspiring." As an FYI: I'll be leaving for the sunny western coast in less than 8 hours. Expect coverage all week starting as soon as I get over jet lag tomorrow.

RobotWisdom writes "Internetnews offers a moderately detailed peek at Google's technology. For example, they use stripped-down Red Hat on a massively redundant network, and they're starting to have success with automatic clustering of concepts, so that pages can match even if none of the words in your query actually appear on the page." Additional analysis on InformationWeek and C|Net. From the article: "As a search query comes into the system, it hits a Web server, then is split into chunks of service. One set of index servers contains the index; one set of machines contains one full index. To actually answer a query, Google has to use one complete set of servers. Since that set is replicated as a fail-safe, it also increases throughput, because if one set is busy, a new query can be routed to the next set, which drives down search time per box."

RobotWisdom writes "This week's New Yorker magazine includes an interesting short history of cellphone ringtones, including statistics on their (huge) profitability worldwide. My favorite quote: 'I spent three days of productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off-- what are they going to hear?'"

RobotWisdom writes "Ibiblio's historic archive for Linux, linked recently, offers lots of old distros, but the dates aren't obvious. I went through and dug out what dates I could for my timeline, but couldn't find any date for several." Robot Wisdom managed to collect an impressive list; read on below for the result.

" The ones I got:

1993: 02Aug: SLS Linux [distro] [more]
1994: 29Jan: Debian version 0.91 [distro]
1994: 05Feb: Slackware 1.1.2 [distro] [more]
1994: Marc Ewing begins the Red Hat GNU/Linux distro [1.0] [more]
1994: 30Mar: MCC Interim 1.0+ [distro]
1994: Apr: SuSE Linux [beta distro]
1994: Oct: Xdenu linux [distro]
1994: 06Nov: SunACM ftp-archives [snapshot] SunSite [snapshot]
1995: Mario Valenti's Mini-linux [distro]
1995: 06Nov: JE linux 0.95 (Japanese extensions) [distro]
1995: 08Dec: BLADE 0.3 for Digital Alpha [distro]
1996: Jan: MIPS port [archive]
1996: 24Apr: Jurix linux [distro]
1996: 17Jun: Debian 1.1 for i386 [distro]
1996: 29Sep: MIT ftp-archives [snapshot] SunSite [snapshot]
1996: 30Sep: dilinux (drop-in for DOS systems) [distro]
1996: 07Oct: TSX-11 ftp-archives [snapshot]

If anyone can supply dates for those I missed (mainly early ports), please use the 'Suggestions' box at the bottom of my timeline page."

RobotWisdom writes "Ibiblio's historic archive for Linux, linked recently, offers lots of old distros, but the dates aren't obvious. I went through and dug out what dates I could for my timeline, but couldn't find any date for several." Robot Wisdom managed to collect an impressive list; read on below for the result.

" The ones I got:

1993: 02Aug: SLS Linux [distro] [more]
1994: 29Jan: Debian version 0.91 [distro]
1994: 05Feb: Slackware 1.1.2 [distro] [more]
1994: Marc Ewing begins the Red Hat GNU/Linux distro [1.0] [more]
1994: 30Mar: MCC Interim 1.0+ [distro]
1994: Apr: SuSE Linux [beta distro]
1994: Oct: Xdenu linux [distro]
1994: 06Nov: SunACM ftp-archives [snapshot] SunSite [snapshot]
1995: Mario Valenti's Mini-linux [distro]
1995: 06Nov: JE linux 0.95 (Japanese extensions) [distro]
1995: 08Dec: BLADE 0.3 for Digital Alpha [distro]
1996: Jan: MIPS port [archive]
1996: 24Apr: Jurix linux [distro]
1996: 17Jun: Debian 1.1 for i386 [distro]
1996: 29Sep: MIT ftp-archives [snapshot] SunSite [snapshot]
1996: 30Sep: dilinux (drop-in for DOS systems) [distro]
1996: 07Oct: TSX-11 ftp-archives [snapshot]

If anyone can supply dates for those I missed (mainly early ports), please use the 'Suggestions' box at the bottom of my timeline page."

RobotWisdom writes "Ibiblio's historic archive for Linux, linked recently, offers lots of old distros, but the dates aren't obvious. I went through and dug out what dates I could for my timeline, but couldn't find any date for several." Robot Wisdom managed to collect an impressive list; read on below for the result.

" The ones I got:

1993: 02Aug: SLS Linux [distro] [more]
1994: 29Jan: Debian version 0.91 [distro]
1994: 05Feb: Slackware 1.1.2 [distro] [more]
1994: Marc Ewing begins the Red Hat GNU/Linux distro [1.0] [more]
1994: 30Mar: MCC Interim 1.0+ [distro]
1994: Apr: SuSE Linux [beta distro]
1994: Oct: Xdenu linux [distro]
1994: 06Nov: SunACM ftp-archives [snapshot] SunSite [snapshot]
1995: Mario Valenti's Mini-linux [distro]
1995: 06Nov: JE linux 0.95 (Japanese extensions) [distro]
1995: 08Dec: BLADE 0.3 for Digital Alpha [distro]
1996: Jan: MIPS port [archive]
1996: 24Apr: Jurix linux [distro]
1996: 17Jun: Debian 1.1 for i386 [distro]
1996: 29Sep: MIT ftp-archives [snapshot] SunSite [snapshot]
1996: 30Sep: dilinux (drop-in for DOS systems) [distro]
1996: 07Oct: TSX-11 ftp-archives [snapshot]

If anyone can supply dates for those I missed (mainly early ports), please use the 'Suggestions' box at the bottom of my timeline page."

RobotWisdom (Jorn Barger) writes "Imagine if William Gibson wrote a James Bond adventure in which a sexual tigress seduces Bond into a Caribbean political crisis, requiring a nighttime scuba-dive into a sunken treasure-wreck, and then a voodoo ceremony that reads like a nightmare acid trip. Now replace James Bond with an "overeducated hick" atheist literature professor from Minnesota. And target the writing to intelligent adults, rather than adolescents. That should give you an idea of the latest novella from Robert Stone, Bay of Souls: A Novel." The book is compact, and so is the rest of Barger's review (below). Bay of Souls: A Novel author Robert Stone pages 256 publisher Houghton Mifflin Company rating 9 reviewer Jorn Barger ISBN 0395963494 summary Classy, intelligent adventure for William Gibson fans

The William Gibson comparison is only a little farfetched -- Gibson acknowledges Stone's "paranoid fiction" as the stylistic inspiration for Neuromancer, so if you liked that writing style, you owe it to yourself to try reading Stone. But his books aren't science fiction, and they aren't just adventure stories by any stretch of the imagination.

Stone's been living on the edge of the counterculture since before Ken Kesey's famous 1964 Magic Bus trip. (In fact, his next book will be a memoir of his adventures with Kesey & Co.) His 1974 tour-de-force Dog Soldiers was about southern California drug smugglers in the Vietnam era. His 1981 A Flag for Sunrise was a painfully realistic study of central American political corruption. And 1998's Damascus Gate explored dozens of flavors of religious fanaticism in present-day Israel. [more background]

But Stone's style is the bedrock these are all anchored by. On the one hand, he uses his style to give a gritty, macho, hardboiled detective-story authenticity, but at the same time he's aiming much higher, into the realm of the literary classics (two of his novels qualified for Harold Bloom's exclusive Western Canon of all-time greats). He likes to weave in lots of casual allusions to interesting-but-obscure historical tidbits (I've started compiling online annotations for Damascus Gate and now for Bay of Souls as well).

You can read a sample online [more] to get a sense of Stone's writing, although that first chapter just shows "the calm before the storm," as the hick professor goes on a short hunting trip, and encounters a tragicomic loser who becomes a recurring motif in the book:

...He was struggling with the odd wheelbarrow across which he had slung his prize deer. It was a thing full of seams and joins and springs. Though it appeared altogether large enough to contain the kill, it could not, and its inutility was the source of his sobs and curses and rage and despair. And as the unfortunate man shoved and hauled, pushed and pulled his burden, covering the ground by inches, the extent of his rage became apparent. To Michael, observing from the tree, it was terrifying ...

This short book (250 pages) isn't for everybody, but I strongly recommend it to Gibson fans who feel curious to explore beyond sci-fi.

You can purchase Bay of Souls from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

RobotWisdom (Jorn Barger) writes "Imagine if William Gibson wrote a James Bond adventure in which a sexual tigress seduces Bond into a Caribbean political crisis, requiring a nighttime scuba-dive into a sunken treasure-wreck, and then a voodoo ceremony that reads like a nightmare acid trip. Now replace James Bond with an "overeducated hick" atheist literature professor from Minnesota. And target the writing to intelligent adults, rather than adolescents. That should give you an idea of the latest novella from Robert Stone, Bay of Souls: A Novel." The book is compact, and so is the rest of Barger's review (below). Bay of Souls: A Novel author Robert Stone pages 256 publisher Houghton Mifflin Company rating 9 reviewer Jorn Barger ISBN 0395963494 summary Classy, intelligent adventure for William Gibson fans

The William Gibson comparison is only a little farfetched -- Gibson acknowledges Stone's "paranoid fiction" as the stylistic inspiration for Neuromancer, so if you liked that writing style, you owe it to yourself to try reading Stone. But his books aren't science fiction, and they aren't just adventure stories by any stretch of the imagination.

Stone's been living on the edge of the counterculture since before Ken Kesey's famous 1964 Magic Bus trip. (In fact, his next book will be a memoir of his adventures with Kesey & Co.) His 1974 tour-de-force Dog Soldiers was about southern California drug smugglers in the Vietnam era. His 1981 A Flag for Sunrise was a painfully realistic study of central American political corruption. And 1998's Damascus Gate explored dozens of flavors of religious fanaticism in present-day Israel. [more background]

But Stone's style is the bedrock these are all anchored by. On the one hand, he uses his style to give a gritty, macho, hardboiled detective-story authenticity, but at the same time he's aiming much higher, into the realm of the literary classics (two of his novels qualified for Harold Bloom's exclusive Western Canon of all-time greats). He likes to weave in lots of casual allusions to interesting-but-obscure historical tidbits (I've started compiling online annotations for Damascus Gate and now for Bay of Souls as well).

You can read a sample online [more] to get a sense of Stone's writing, although that first chapter just shows "the calm before the storm," as the hick professor goes on a short hunting trip, and encounters a tragicomic loser who becomes a recurring motif in the book:

...He was struggling with the odd wheelbarrow across which he had slung his prize deer. It was a thing full of seams and joins and springs. Though it appeared altogether large enough to contain the kill, it could not, and its inutility was the source of his sobs and curses and rage and despair. And as the unfortunate man shoved and hauled, pushed and pulled his burden, covering the ground by inches, the extent of his rage became apparent. To Michael, observing from the tree, it was terrifying ...

This short book (250 pages) isn't for everybody, but I strongly recommend it to Gibson fans who feel curious to explore beyond sci-fi.

You can purchase Bay of Souls from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

RobotWisdom (Jorn Barger) writes "Imagine if William Gibson wrote a James Bond adventure in which a sexual tigress seduces Bond into a Caribbean political crisis, requiring a nighttime scuba-dive into a sunken treasure-wreck, and then a voodoo ceremony that reads like a nightmare acid trip. Now replace James Bond with an "overeducated hick" atheist literature professor from Minnesota. And target the writing to intelligent adults, rather than adolescents. That should give you an idea of the latest novella from Robert Stone, Bay of Souls: A Novel." The book is compact, and so is the rest of Barger's review (below). Bay of Souls: A Novel author Robert Stone pages 256 publisher Houghton Mifflin Company rating 9 reviewer Jorn Barger ISBN 0395963494 summary Classy, intelligent adventure for William Gibson fans

The William Gibson comparison is only a little farfetched -- Gibson acknowledges Stone's "paranoid fiction" as the stylistic inspiration for Neuromancer, so if you liked that writing style, you owe it to yourself to try reading Stone. But his books aren't science fiction, and they aren't just adventure stories by any stretch of the imagination.

Stone's been living on the edge of the counterculture since before Ken Kesey's famous 1964 Magic Bus trip. (In fact, his next book will be a memoir of his adventures with Kesey & Co.) His 1974 tour-de-force Dog Soldiers was about southern California drug smugglers in the Vietnam era. His 1981 A Flag for Sunrise was a painfully realistic study of central American political corruption. And 1998's Damascus Gate explored dozens of flavors of religious fanaticism in present-day Israel. [more background]

But Stone's style is the bedrock these are all anchored by. On the one hand, he uses his style to give a gritty, macho, hardboiled detective-story authenticity, but at the same time he's aiming much higher, into the realm of the literary classics (two of his novels qualified for Harold Bloom's exclusive Western Canon of all-time greats). He likes to weave in lots of casual allusions to interesting-but-obscure historical tidbits (I've started compiling online annotations for Damascus Gate and now for Bay of Souls as well).

You can read a sample online [more] to get a sense of Stone's writing, although that first chapter just shows "the calm before the storm," as the hick professor goes on a short hunting trip, and encounters a tragicomic loser who becomes a recurring motif in the book:

...He was struggling with the odd wheelbarrow across which he had slung his prize deer. It was a thing full of seams and joins and springs. Though it appeared altogether large enough to contain the kill, it could not, and its inutility was the source of his sobs and curses and rage and despair. And as the unfortunate man shoved and hauled, pushed and pulled his burden, covering the ground by inches, the extent of his rage became apparent. To Michael, observing from the tree, it was terrifying ...

This short book (250 pages) isn't for everybody, but I strongly recommend it to Gibson fans who feel curious to explore beyond sci-fi.

You can purchase Bay of Souls from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

RobotWisdom asks: "Has anyone run across (or even heard of) an up-to-date overview of the most-important new subdomains for software applications? Inspired by the popularity of my timeline of Unix/Linux, for the last few months I've been working on a new timeline of AI, simulations, and knowledge-representation in general. Digging around online for links about simulation, for example, I discovered vast areas I was completely unaware of, mostly oriented towards the US military. In another context, I started noticing the TLAs 'SCM' and 'CRM' in relation to business software, and had to trackdown what they were all about. This morning I clicked on a banner ad for 'ModelSim' and discovered the TLAs 'HDL' and 'RTL' for simulating logic-chips. Another recent news item led me to the burgeoning field of medical simulations. But what I'm not getting is any sense of an overview of all these specialized domains, that seem to have emerged in software only in the last 30 years. Are there university classes that deal with this, giving a capsule portrait of each one? Textbooks?? Webpages???"

RobotWisdom asks: "Has anyone run across (or even heard of) an up-to-date overview of the most-important new subdomains for software applications? Inspired by the popularity of my timeline of Unix/Linux, for the last few months I've been working on a new timeline of AI, simulations, and knowledge-representation in general. Digging around online for links about simulation, for example, I discovered vast areas I was completely unaware of, mostly oriented towards the US military. In another context, I started noticing the TLAs 'SCM' and 'CRM' in relation to business software, and had to trackdown what they were all about. This morning I clicked on a banner ad for 'ModelSim' and discovered the TLAs 'HDL' and 'RTL' for simulating logic-chips. Another recent news item led me to the burgeoning field of medical simulations. But what I'm not getting is any sense of an overview of all these specialized domains, that seem to have emerged in software only in the last 30 years. Are there university classes that deal with this, giving a capsule portrait of each one? Textbooks?? Webpages???"

RobotWisdom asks: "Has anyone run across (or even heard of) an up-to-date overview of the most-important new subdomains for software applications? Inspired by the popularity of my timeline of Unix/Linux, for the last few months I've been working on a new timeline of AI, simulations, and knowledge-representation in general. Digging around online for links about simulation, for example, I discovered vast areas I was completely unaware of, mostly oriented towards the US military. In another context, I started noticing the TLAs 'SCM' and 'CRM' in relation to business software, and had to trackdown what they were all about. This morning I clicked on a banner ad for 'ModelSim' and discovered the TLAs 'HDL' and 'RTL' for simulating logic-chips. Another recent news item led me to the burgeoning field of medical simulations. But what I'm not getting is any sense of an overview of all these specialized domains, that seem to have emerged in software only in the last 30 years. Are there university classes that deal with this, giving a capsule portrait of each one? Textbooks?? Webpages???"

RobotWisdom asks: "As I follow the scientific results from the Hubble and other space telescopes, it sure seems like they're delivering a ton more bang-for-the-buck than particle accelerators could ever dream of. If we can map the universe at every wavelength, won't this be data enough to -deduce- the particle laws? Is there still any reason to waste any money on accelerators?"

rockville writes "I found this from Robot Wisdom, then I tried it myself: when you search Lycos for Excite, Yahoo, or Infoseek, you get a pretty strange result " I guess I can understand the reasons behind doing that, but it still feels kinda wrong. What do you think?

Weblogs -- described by one of their creators as the "pirate radio stations" of the Web, are a new, personal, and determinedly non-hostile evolution of the electric community. They are also the freshest example of how people use the Net to make their own, radically different new media. A look at Weblogs plus a list of a few identifiable existing species in the electric community. Feel free, of course, to add your own.

Electric Community Part Two:

Here Comes the Weblog

The members of electronic communities like Slashdot come together in the first place because of some shared interest - in this case a complex, sometimes highly technical range of acquired knowledge - Linux, open source, programming. An individualistic community with a common purpose, sites like this attract focused, like-minded participants, programmers and developers whose shared experience was mastery of a complex operating system, a willingness to endure technical hurdles, and an almost secret common language.

Newcomers, drawn to see what's going on or foraging for information themselves, often enrage the established dwellers of an e-community. They don't know as much, ask stupid questions, speak a different language. Intruders, they throw the ecological balance out of whack.

Mark Stefik of the Information Sciences and Technology Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, likens this resentment to the problem of assimilation when natural disasters or wars cause mass exodus to new lands. When the rate of immigration exceeds a certain level, the resulting chaos in the host country can evoke tremendous resentment and backlash.

Size is a factor, too. As an electric community grows, so do the maintenance costs - hardware, bandwidth, the pressure coherently present more and more information, the need for revenue to support all these functions. As more and more people move through the site, it's harder to recognize addresses, message styles, or individual personalities.

So an electronic community faces, from the beginning, a serious dilemma --- whether to stay small, but remain marginal, or to grow, and becoming more profitable and acquiring more bandwidth and software. In a sense, it suffers either way. If a community stays small, it starves. If it grows, it suffers in a different way. The WELL, one of the first and most important electronic communities (I've been a member for years) has survived by remaining small, smart and simple.

Many of its members have reasons for avoiding too much hostility. They have continuing, powerful, very personal ties to one another. Topics range from science and technology to culture, movies and parenting. And the WELL has been successful in part by providing strong, experienced moderators with authority who discourage eruptions of hostility and keep conversations on track without discouraging free speech.

E-communities without personal forums - jobs, parenting, family life - have a tougher time forming a sense of community, since there's no real way for members to get to know one another. People aren't attacking human beings they know, but disembodied voices and messages.

From the beginning, the Net and the Web have been about individuals creating their own media. This process evolves constantly as people online struggle to find communities where they can glean information, keep up with new technologies, receive help, make human contact.

Some online sociologists use the club analogy when it comes to differentiating large and public versus small and exclusive e-communities.

Exclusive discussion groups - those that limit membership and topics - are like private clubs in that they offer membership by invitation or even fees. In these smaller e-communities, people can speak more freely, perhaps say things they wouldn't say in public.

Stefik writes: "To take the private-club idea another step forward, consider the possibility of private clubs with exclusive memberships, rules about confidentiality with real bite, and limits on the ability of the excluded public to post'There might be private newsgroups for people who are generally inaccessible - for example, major financiers, philanthropists, leaders of powerful companies, or even scientists."

The recent surge in classy, well-designed, intensely-linked weblogs - almost all, essentially reflecting the interests and tastes of their creators and a small number of like-minded people -- suggests a non-commercial version on Stefik's idea.

The weblog isn't a new term on the Net, but it's being used in a new way. One previous definition of weblog is an archive of activity on a web server. Another is an online diary. But in the context of the e-community, the weblog is new, and evolving rapidly, despite the fact that specialized and idiosyncratic sites have been around for some years.

On Camworld.com, Cameron Barrett has written about and developing his notion of the weblog - he calls it a small, eclectic site, usually maintained by one person, with a high concentration of repeat visitors, plentiful WWW links, and a zero tolerance for flames.

Barrett, an interactive designer, writes on Camworld ("Anatomy Of A Weblog" ) that he heard the term "weblog" for the first time a few months ago, but isn't sure who coined it.

Weblogs are a perfect example of the biological evolution of electronic communities. Very personal foraging sites, they are limited in membership, their links continuously updated, and are often focused on a single subject or theme.

They seem to almost all be ideologically opposed to hostility, including essayish commentary and observations. Because the site creator limits and approves membership, they don't need to be defended as intensely as bigger sites, nor do they attract - or permit - posters who abuse others. One obvious payoff is that the flow of ideas is strong, uninterrupted and impressive.

Barrett calls weblogs "microportals. Some weblogs: Smug; Flutterby; Scripting News; ; Stating the Obvious -- I was startled to come upon a column by Rogers Cadenhead about why I don't belong on Slashdot (weblogs may be less hostile, but don't look for sweet, either); Obscure Store, and Joshua Eli Schachter's very smart memepool.

Some webpools are designed by their creators simply to revolve around what they find interesting. Writer Keith Dawson describes webpools as "filtered news," but as with anything having to do with the Net and the Web, there are lots of different points of view.

The Christian Science Monitor newspaper, e-mails Christine Booker, was "weblogging" their own publication earlier this week. That is, an editor provided synapses of articles of interest, with links and particularly notable quotes. The editor was providing pre-digested highlights of his paper, only without commentary. Thus "weblogging" has even come to journalism, not usually an institution on the forefront of digital change.

The point is, Booker wrote, instead of asking readers to scan headlines to decide what to read, they have a section at the top of their World report that says, in effect: our international editor puts foreign news coverage in perspective so that you can go straight to the meat. In a different way, that's what weblogs do - interesting stories for pre-selected communities.

Booker, who designs and manages websites for the University of Washington Department of Surgery, and is an avid reader of weblogs, says it's important to convey their personal nature. "Even sites that don't contain any original content or much commentary give me a glimpse into the mind of the weblogger. What someone chooses to link tells me what they're interested in, what they think is funny, what they find absurd. Some webloggers offer links embedded in one or two lines of more or less oblique commentar" (jjg.net) Booker says that as far as she can tell, many, if not most of these sites started very informally and then, one way or another, the URL got passed around soon these "hobby sites" developted devoted audiences, readers who visit them at least daily, sometimes more.

Jesse James Garrett, content editor for Ingram Micro's Web site and editor of the weblog jjg.net says that "weblogs are the pirate radio stations of the Web, personal platforms through which individuals broadcast their perspectives on current events, the media, our culture, and basically anything else that strikes their fancy from the vast sea of raw material available out there on the Web. Some are more topic-focused than others, but all are really built around someone's personal interests. Neither a faceless news-gathering organization nor an impersonal clipping service, a quality weblog is distinguished by the voice of its editor, and that editor's connection with his or her audience."

One of the best weblogs I found was Peter Merholz's peterme.com. "How freakin? cool is this?" he asks in the lead item for May 12, writing about tracking satellites live and real-time using a 3D Java applet. The site mixes the best of web design and technology - interface, design, web development - with pop culture: movie reviews, an essay on the late cartoonist Shel Silverstein.

Merholz has decided, "for what it's worth," to pronounce "weblog" as "we? - blog."

While weblogs don't have the reach and influence - thus, the commercial potential -- of larger, more inter-active and open sites, it's easy to imagine them as powerful supplements to the major foraging sites. And, depending on their members, could be influential at sharing memes, essays and ideas.

Cameron Barrett's thoughts on weblogs can be found here, along with his list of favorites. Keith Dawson, who runs the Tasty Bits of Technology Front site - in some ways a pioneer, classic weblog, also has written about weblogs at here.

To me, weblogs may embody personalized media on the Net - enterprising geeks creating interesting new sites that set out to define news in different ways, to be both interesting, coherent, and more civil. This is the complete opposite structure of conventional media, which is top-down, boring and inherently arrogant.

They may be among the first e-communities to successfully overcome online hostility and abuse as well. That alone could make them highly popular.

Weblogs, however personal, are foraging sites in the classic sense of the term.

But Weblogs aside, the idea of electronic communities as encompassing distinct biological types is irresistible. And it makes sense. I'd identify these species of electric villagers. Add your own:

FORAGERS ( Stefik would call them Wolves): the people running sites or submitting and linking to discovered information.

LURKERS (Stefik's Spiders): The largest group, professionals, academics, researchers and others whose needs for information is practical, and who wait for it, usually in silence.

FISHERMEN: People who trawl selected sub-topics or discussions for specific data, such as information about a kind of information or software.

HELPERS: Electronic communities often have a compliment of knowledgeable veterans who welcome newcomers, and are happy to counsel them in the ways of the site. The helpers don't see newcomers as a threat, but an opportunity for the village to grow and prosper.

IDEOLOGISTS (as in priests and theologists): Vigilant for deviations from what they perceive as the site's purpose, they disagree and criticize, sometimes sharply, but rarely with venom or cruelty.

DEFENDERS (as in warrior bees or ants): Ideologically- driven flamers who seek to keep their communities pure, free from intrusive outsiders, whom they see as threatening and de-stabilizing.

ANONYMOUS COWARDS (Spies, informers, information bringers and Braying Hyenas): Two types, people with legitimate information that they can't share under their own names, and exhibitionists who get to express hostility without consequence. The single biggest cause of the destruction of communities, they are the most frequently cited reason newcomers flee, veterans tire and advertisers move on to more hospitable environments.

TECHS (worker bees and ants): The people in any community for whom the construction of the site is its own reward. They are constantly working to offer options and services, improve software and access.

Some questions: What does an electric community need to work? Are there other identifiable types of e-community members? Are new kinds of sites like weblogs the future, or a minor step on the evolutionary chain?