Slashdot Mirror
Making The News - In the Age Of The Internet
A reader writes:"Dan Gillmor has just published a column on his weblog about creating a collaborative book with his readers. The outline/full details are on his page - O'Reilly will be publishing the book." Dan and I spoke briefly about this - it's semisimilar to what Slashdot did with Jane's Intelligence Review - which turned out well.
The only collaboration necessary in writing is from fact checkers who verify the veracity of the content and an editor who makes sure that the author doesn't look like an idiot who can't spell 'lose' and 'definitely'.
If you are acting in either of these capacities without getting paid, you are a sucker.
I have been pwned because my
FP! AFAIK IANAL :-D
mmmkay; point taken, dude!
I really can't see O'Reilly publishing a book replete with l337sp34k, goatse.cx links and old "In Soviet Russia.." lines, but what do I know?
Trolling is a art,
Hope the best for the author but I will not be buying it.
And why put out a book when you have perfectly good web publishing tools, money perhaps??? So for all the talk in the outline about news being different on the web, its really not for the authors - weblog != money for authors.
Does anyone know of any open source tools that facillitate writing a book using a large group of dispersed people?
Chapter two though is all about /. yay! Will the book be free to download as well?
The real question is, how many people will pay to read what basically amounts to a Paper bound version of slashdot. Understandably, everyone who contributes will want a copy in order to see his name mentioned in the contributors section, but will this be particularly profitable for O'Reilly otherwise?
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
To me this looks like another old media giving way to new media. The internet is bringing us all together etc. New levels of information freedom *cough*. I thinks its a cool idea but I do hope there will some examples of how the internet hasn't yet beaten things like TV for getting information across to a wide audience quickly and effectivly
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
These guys at must be geniuses:
....
1. Get loads of idiots online to collaborate on a book
2. Publish book
3. Idiots from (1.) will want to buy the book they are in
4. Profit!!!!
PS. is it just me or is slashdot very slashdotted today?
Hmmm...
I wouldnt mind contributing but what do I get for it? Looks lkike I still will have to buy the books to get any info.
I rather like the Bruce Eckel model, he publishes the book online, anybody can contribute online(though your contributions might not make it to the paper version), and you only have to pay if you want a paper copy of the book. Almost like GPL.The end result does look good.
Or maybe the Wikipedia model More like BSD license.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
And a big STFU Katz! out to all you oldskool slashdotters!
Arguably, it also produces a lot of trash, but hey, there's a market for that, too.
The interesting thing here is that O'Reilly is taking this up with Gillmor. Not everyone can get published by O'Reilly, so what's a regular guy to do? Use Lulu.com, a new site founded by Bob Young, formerly of RedHat. You register as an author, and your collaborators register as an author, and you can all submit chapters to each other's books for collaboration. Then you can set price for online, print, or cd distribution, collecting an 80% royalty. No other publishing deal I know of sets an 80% royalty to the author.
Or choose no royalty and set the price for online distribution to free. Books can be published under any license you like, just place the copyright page with the license you like in the book when you upload it.
New writers should be made aware that the advancements in spam-filters are also advancements for big brother to get ahold of to pick and choose what articles to filter in or out. When spam-filter work well on electronic mail, what is to stop them from work on normal network traffic.
Collaboration is a good thing. It's the foundation of things like the Free Software movement, and Open Source movement. It's how performers make good music.
Arguably, it also produces a lot of trash, but hey, there's a market for that, too.
The interesting thing here is that O'Reilly is taking this up with Gillmor. Not everyone can get published by O'Reilly, so what's a regular guy to do?
Use Lulu.com, a new site founded by Bob Young, formerly of RedHat. You register as an author, and your collaborators register as an author, and you can all submit chapters to each other's books for collaboration. Then you can set price for online, print, or cd distribution, collecting an 80% royalty. No other publishing deal I know of sets an 80% royalty to the author.
Or choose no royalty and set the price for online distribution to free. Books can be published under any license you like, just place the copyright page with the license you like in the book when you upload it.
For one ghastly moment I thought Jon Katz was posting again!
I like his intros to each paragraph summary. "Something happened! Clueless old media farts ignored it! Hip, happenin' bloggers circle-linked it to death! Hilarity and/or new paradigms ensued!"
I suppose if I actually felt it would make any difference, I would write a long piece about why this will not fundamentally change journalism, and submit it to Gillmor. But I suspect he is already too far down the path for it to have much of an effect.
- adam
Can the /. model be ported to topics other than tech news? What do you guys think about the failure of plastic.com? After 2 years, the site is essentially unknown to the general public and established media (unlike slashdot). I am doubting that this model of journalism can be successful when the readership is not so nerdish as in /. or kuro5hin (which has an even more complex method). I wish it weren't so but I think the facts seem to be speaking.
/. crowd is missing a chance to be constructing. Most posts are complaining about the article and are entirely missing the point of the proposed book
PS on a side note, I think the
I just made one.
There are a lot of collaborative fiction sites around including http://www.prosebush.com -- check it out.... Mostly crap, but every once and a while a few people get together and create some great stuff.
I don't think it's fair to say that plastic has failed. They still have daily posts with a good number of responses. Probably the reason plastic is less popular than /. and kuro5hin is due to its generalist nature. Basically I could do what they do sitting in the break room with a newspaper and my coworkers. Even back in the 80s specialization was viewed as the formula for BBS success. Although kuro5hin is more general than /. I would say that its high percentage of user written content makes it unique. For example, the user written science fiction short story a few days ago.
Although blogging/BBSing/cmc/etc is journalism in some instances, mostly its just conversation. Since I don't believe that the letters to the editor page is the ultimate in public discourse, I consider this a good thing and not a bad thing.
You post two identical comments (save for links that you spell out in one post, then turn them into clickable links in the second), and get + rated on both?
Anyone got the URL for the promised article (was promised to appear in Dec 2002, with free web access)?
I can't find it at the site.
Using Jane's site search with entry "Slashdot" pulls up a log in request page. Trying to register (which wasn't part of Jane's promise) gets a response that they aren't requiring logins now. Clicking "continue your visit" brings me back to the exact same login page again - infinite loop!
Was their promise to the Slashdot community a sham?
That's harsh.
On the monkeys.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have a box of telephone rings under my bed. Whenever I get lonely, I
open it up a little bit, and I get a phone call. One day I dropped the
box all over the floor. The phone wouldn't stop ringing. I had to get
it disconnected. So I got a new phone. I didn't have much money, so I
had to get an irregular. It doesn't have a five. I ran into a friend
of mine on the street the other day. He said why don't you give me a
call. I told him I can't call everybody I want to anymore, my phone
doesn't have a five. He asked how long had it been that way. I said I
didn't know -- my calendar doesn't have any sevens.
-- Steven Wright
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