Slashdot Mirror
Wading Through Weblogs, One Idea at a Time
candot writes "Remember the recent slashdot story on NASA cancelling the moon hoax book? Wonder what other weblogs are saying about the subject?
Launched today (in beta), the Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics. The Waypath Project's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically. Look for the disclaimers about varying quality you'd expect from an automated classification system, such as at Google News. You're encouraged to embed WP results in your weblog pages. Be the first on your block to try it out, today -- unless it gets slashdotted, then tomorrow. Resources are limited, so pace yourselves."
It seems to me that blogs are a haven for angsty, mal-adjusted, teenage primadonnas. Is this an article directed at the ever growing teenage portion of the Slashdot audience? Really, who reads these things, they're a waste of time.
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It's proprietary, closed-source, dirt slow, written in Java, inaccurate, and prone to nasty debug screens.
Take a look at slashdot, livejournal, and everything2 -- everything works like clockwork. I think the open source community could, and should, write better code for this.
Wonder what other weblogs are saying about the subject?
Ummm... no. But thanks anyway.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Be the first on your block to try it out, today -- unless it gets slashdotted, then tomorrow. Resources are limited, so pace yourselves.
Others have said it but here it is again. Slashdot is a great resource but many interesting sites become inaccessable due to their servers not being able to handle the load. Why can't Slashdot set up a cache of the interesting pages like google does?
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
... for example slashdot is a news and discussion site rather than a genuine^H^H^H^H^H^H^H out an out weblog. It may not have been such when the site started, but a large number of slashdot subscribers look at this site as a source of nerd news, not trivia, and definitely not to peek into other peoples diaries.
As for the hoax, the less discussion on the subject the better. It cannot be conclusivey proved that it was a hoax, and those who believe it was one will not listen to reason.
I always thought that combining the setup of Everything2 and a massive amout of blogs would create something great. This is a step in this direction. Is there anybody else agreeing that combining E2 with Waypath would make the best reference source ever?
Because that would involve them either manually downloading and saving the cached copy or actually spending time to write code to automatically download and cache a copy of everything that's linked. If you want the feature, submit the patch to slashcode. Then it might eventually end up on slashdot.
But in this case it wouldn't help at all since it's more of an application than a web site. All the pages are dynamic... it's like trying to cache Google.
[This is a plug]
/.); but really it can use anything as a trust metric.
Memigo spots memes and interesting news ahead of weblogs, including Slashdot, instead of relying on trailing metrics like blogs. How? it monitors how users rate individual articles and creates personalised recommendations for each user (yep, kinda like Amazon).
The sites and articles are also inserted into a web of trust, so when a new article/meme shows up, it inherits the trusts of its author and recommenders. The point is to be a leading indicator of interest and sniff out interesting news first...
To be fair, memigo parses a few blogs too (that tend to make news, rather than follow them, such as
Try it, you will be pleasantly suprised --yes, you need a login for the personal recommendations, but there is no requirement for any personal info, including any sort of e-mail address...
For those who can't be bothered to go and read it/for when it gets Slashdotted:
If an infinite number of bloggers write an infinite number of postings, and a search engine cross-references them all, does this give us anything more than Word Salad? If the site wasn't broken I'm curious enough to try it, but I'm sceptical. Most blogs are (possibly) interesting if you know the people: otherwise, they are about as thrilling as someone else's holiday snaps. And the most used category is going to be me me me...
Also, newsy weblogs such as /. end up being cross-referenced anyway, because sooner or later someone posts a 'hey have you seen what they are saying on...' message.
Virtually serving coffee
Because that would involve them either manually downloading and saving the cached copy or actually spending time to write code to automatically download and cache a copy of everything that's linked.
Maybe Slashdot should invest $40 and buy a copy of Black Widow site mirroring tool? Maybe it is a legal thing but google has a cache of many sites including ones taken down.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Hmmm, Looks like M$ should write their own version in .NET.
To hell with standards, we just want the data!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
the Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics.
They're called "Web rings". You might remember them.
Asides from that, who the hell cares what some kid in Tacoma thinks about the NASA book? Or, for that matter, who the hell cares what a kid in Tacoma thinks about anything? No one.
WBELOGS == TEH GEYEST! Just stop.
So sally breaks up with don, whose weblog indicates he's now really hot for janet, could care less about Don but really like Barry, who donkey punched Jane, who is best friend with Sally. Hrm... makes it so much clearer now
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Others have answered it but here it is again.
So just as a test I plopped the URL http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021107. html from the /. story Could Eolas End Microsoft's Browser Dominance? into the search field on the Waypath Project page and well all it ended up giving me was a bunch of Microsoft related hits, nothing to really do with the specifics of the article itself. Maybe the word "Microsoft" is too prevalent and therefor overweighted?
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
If you want to know what weblogs are saying about the Nasa moon hoax story then I recommend you get psycholog^H^H^H^H put a bookmark on good old Blogdex. Fine format, good leads to web stories both nerdy and not. You want links (and related weblogs) for the text of the UN Resolution on Iraq, the hockey dad suing to get his son named MVP, or a simple tool to give you the size and text of any web page? They're on Blogdex today.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
it would appear that you are supposed to enter a URL there....
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AlmostFreeLinux.com
Slow news day, huh /. ?
Be the first on your block to program your weblog to automatically generate amusing nonsense when polled by a blog hog.
Idiot.
What, no mention of Blogdex, the Media Diffusion Index? It's several years old, and is pretty good at picking current trends.
~GoRK
I think they could set up a cache.slashdot.org server and have it fetch copies of all the links right before the story is posted. Then put a [cached] link for each one in the 'Related Links' section to the right of the story header. Of course they couldn't have banners on top, that would be violating copyright. But a simple google style cache of every link in the story would be a useful add-on to slashcode.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I like sites like this
I mean, Waypath is at one level convenient, but no more so than well established weblog communities such as
blo.gs, the Eaton WebPortal and blogs4God. Moreover, when it comes to gleaning headline news via a blog, I would suspect the real weapon of cohice would be our personal aggregators such as Amphetadesk and HotSheet?
Which is where the WMDI comes in. It helps me identify sites via xml-ish mechanisms such as the Dublin Core Initiative
Then again, your mileage may vary.
--- have you healed your church website?
Hah! That's funny... reading the directions would have helped. Still, the lack of input checking and catching exceptions is funny.
That reply in the FAQ is 2 years old. Lots has changed since then. Storage is cheaper and Slashcode has been updated. There must be a way around the cache problem even if it was just selective to those who volunteer a link to their own small sites. I wonder if Slashdot has ever been threatened with a lawsuit for causing a denial of service attack?
And how is this off topic if it was brought up in the subject header? Dang.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I'm a day late, but I was away from computing yesterday. I run another project called Tangnet, that is sort of a similar idea, but (at this point) makes no attempt to link blog postings by idea, but focuses more on common traits between the authors of blogs. It's new but growing.