Slashdot Mirror
What Does the Open Source Community Need?
dlc asks: "i have a simple question for slashdot readers. let's say, hypothetically speaking, that i have a Linux box, co-located on a fast pipe, with fresh builds of the kernel, Apache, mod_perl, and MySQL, and i want to contribute back to the community. we already have a slashdot and a freshmeat, a segfault and a themes.org, a linux.com and a kernel.org; what else is there to be done? What do Slashdot readers want that they cannot find somewhere else? Is a user-driven site (such as Slashdot or Freshmeat) preferable to a content driven site (such as linux.com or kernel.org)? "
There are other sites using Slashdot software and covering similar topics. Alas, they don't use English. Thus the readership is lower, the high-level posters ("I am the researcher mentioned in the article from Science and...") are fewer, and the troll quantity is much lower.
I suppose it correlates with the size of the site.
I won't point to them so that they don't get "too popular".
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I like slashdot and I spend a lot of time here, too much! :) One of the ideas I've played with, but lack the skills to implement is a kind of summary or synopsis of the slashdot comments on a story by story basis, and then on a theme by theme basis.
I figure this could be done initially and crudely using simple word count searches: index all words (skipping "the,and,a" etc.)in a forum and build a histogram. This by itself would be only so-so interesting, but if you expand it to include immediately adjacent words it gets more interesting. Think of a more developed and refined Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter. And then two neighbouring words, etc.
Why is this interesting? Because it would be the closest thing to describing what the slashdot community as whole thinks. The meta-slashdot would be a sort of ongoing ballot or poll.
Although I've only mentioned Slashdot, there's no reason the same technique couldn't be brought to bear on any discussion group.
-matt
Oh, wait...that's Mars that needs women (or am I the only one who remembers that song?). Nevermind.
For example, a site dedicated to a specific topic, such as Apache, or book reviews? Is there enough of a market, or interest, in any one of these categories? How many new stories are there every day about, e.g., Apache, that would interest readers without becoming ApacheWeek, an Apache mirror, or a site dedicated to programming Apache? (not that those are not all great ideas!) I'm definitely OK with being that technical, but the question is, would there be enough reader interest for it to be worthwhile? (i ran with the Apache topic here, but it could apply to a lot of other topics.)
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
One of the early ideas I had was something along these lines, as well. A site where people would post their code, and it could be peer-reviewed in the same way that people post comments on Slashdot now, crossed with an LXR-type display with line numbering, named anchors, etc. It's a great idea, I think, but extremely difficult to implement well -- for example, how do you attach comments to particular lines without completely disrupting the flow of the code? There are (mostly non-portable) hacks, such as using DHTML to make the comments collapsible, but things like that might detract from the content of the site.
Of course, there's very little non-programmer appeal to this sort of a site, and even most programmers would probably only be interested in a few of the postings at any given time. How would you like to log in one day and see only LISP and Applescript stuff? I think I'd get pretty annoyed and stop visiting after a few days of that.... (no offense meant if you happen to use either of those languages; I like LISP myself).
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
I'm a little leary of setting out specifically to build a "less popular" anything... :)
But seriously, this is one of the things I've been considering, but one of the appeals of slashdot is that it covers the "News For Nerds" topic pretty comprehensively. "Patent Issues for Nerds" or "Free Borland Compilers for Nerds" are probably a little too restrictive, and won't get much traffic.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
how about a site detailing the important nerd-news, but aimed at non nerds?
Take the whole amazon/patents thing. Even in the trade papers it's only getting small amounts of coverage. Loads of /.ers are getting really angry and making lots of noise, but when you look at it, they are only preaching to the perverted. Outside the geek forums nobody knows about it.
If you took things like this, and covered them with all the techno jargon removed (or at least explained) then maybe the "stuff that matters" will propogate further
possibly...