Slashdot Mirror
On Collaborative Weblogs
fernand0 writes "The 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism has dealt with some blogging issues (see the Symposium Research Papers). One that can be of interest for Slashdot readers is When the Audience is the Producer: The Art of the Collaborative Weblog (pdf). There, four collective weblogs are examined: MetaFilter, Plastic, Kuro5hin, and Slashdot, and some discussion is done about the different ways of collaboration that emerge from these sites."
When i hear the word WebBlog, I think journal. Public journal that is. Slashdot is more of a news site where users can post commets. I would like to know the author's reason on why slashdot is a blog. If slashdot is a blog, then it must have the record for being the world's BIGGEST blog.
I mean, seriously folks, that's just stupid.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
Sure this makes for generally interesting articles/reading. The real value I see with these Blogs/sites is it's a cheap peer-review process. I have an idea. I submit my idea. I get immediate, high-volume feedback. Saves me publishing to a journal. At least the value can be had on the surface.
I have been very impressed with ./'s moderation system, though. Plus Slashdot allows anyone to post what they want - so it can be read for humor and for knowledge. Entertaining and informative.
I just gave a lecture on colaborative construction of knowledge on the WEB last week.
I just mentioned wikipedia and everything2 on my work.
One interesting thing I found out: the content in wikipedia is much more "professional", and enciclopedic than E2's. But the software for E2 has much more possibilities, and is far more entertaining to create content for than wikipedia's. E2's larger weakness seem to be the lacking of support for image uploads or linking.
-><- no
Would Wiki not be considered a type of collaborative weblog?
It happens a lot (too often) that Wiki is forgotten... in so many discussions on internet technology... when it's probably as r/evolutionary as email and chat. Maybe not, tho, maybe blogs are better, and maybe wikis are flawed in a way that they deserve to be ignored... not sure...
Does /. really count as a weblog anymore? For that matter, do any of the sites mentioned? It's a hard call - BoingBoing and similar sites seem to fit the bill for collaborative weblogs far better than discussion forums like /. I think the sites listed have really moved beyond weblog status. They really seem to be closer to forums and aggregators. This isn't a bad thing - it's just different and may require independant analysis. They've grown beyond (and in many cases existed before) what is commonly considered a weblog these days.
Interestingly, this month's Wired had an article on weblogs / nanopublishing and highlighted a variety of collaborative weblogs, likely as a tie-in to the conference.
"Be proud to be a fighter" - Martial Arts Adage
If too many people read this paper and the nice things it says about Slashdot, we will be overwhelmed by aspirational would-be techies...fortunately it's been posted on Slashdot, virtually guaranteeing that hardly anyone will actually read it.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Not as stupid as the people that actually click on it.
Sig temporarily out of service.
where topics are discussed and debated
a [web]log is the modern equivalent of a diary except publicly accessable, since when has public discussion ever been part of a diary ?
The article talks a bit about the moderation system, and karma, and all the fun stuff we have come to love here at SlashDot. What it carefully avoids is the discussion of trolls and AC posts. It is summarized by stating that -1 in the moderation system is sufficient to render a troll invisible.
Over time there have been a lot of discussions here about trolls and ACs. They have their place here, and they each contribute as well as take away. It would have been interesting to have read a little more about what the study found about trolls and AC posts, positive and negative...
A love beyond compare...
tell me about it, i dont want us to get /.ed!
bullshit. wiki's and 'blogs (i don't like the term either) are fundamentally different things.
that the report is in PDF but they are talking about the web
try HTML if you want people to read your article on the Internet
instead of that disgusting Adobe PDF format, you might as well post a swf flash file if we are going down the route of plugins and third party formats to read goddam TEXT on the internet
i guess some people never realised what PDF is supposed to be for
Maybe it's just a attempt to slashdot slashdot
In theory, the organization of a group weblog is similar to the structure Hamilton was searching for. This form of weblog also falls into the general category of an online community, alongside more traditional community forms like bulletin boards and chatrooms.
In his study of decentralized mob behavior, Rheingold pursued this line of inquiry further (2002). He also highlighted Slashdot and its 300,000 members as an example ofself-organized behavior by "smart mobs" and "swarm systems," which grow to exhibit collective intelligence that is greater than the sum of their parts (Rhengold p179).Rheingold notes that the many-to-many media model found in a group weblog empowers the audience by allowing them to "create, publish, broadcast, and debate their own pointof view" in ways previously unheard of in the print and broadcast mediums. Like others before him, Rheingold was not sure if this newfound ability would provide a legitimatecounterforce to society's dominant forces, or just be a simulation of a counterforce that feels empowering but, in reality, is toothless. Nevertheless, he concluded that beforeanyone could reach such a verdict, or determine a way to alter that outcome, there is a need for more knowledge of how such technologies, and the people that use them,function today.
The author then continues to refer to Slashdot (and the others) as collaborative group weblogs without ever trying to make the distinction between a weblog and the aforementioned "online community". So as best as I can tell, the author simply likes the buzzword "weblog" and is actually studying online communities and group/thought dynamics(how's that for a buzzword?) on the web.
Yawn.
Well now at least one link in the article won't get /.ed.
You fool, you have slashdotted Slashdot!
Apparently all these years that I've been using the words 'procrastinate' and 'waste of time', I really could have used 'colloborative weblogs'. It makes it sound like you're doing something useful.
This may quite possibly be the first time that all the readers have read at least one of the linked articles in the story. Maybe the editors should link back to /. more often.
The problem with sites like those mentioned is what they call the purple monkey syndrome. Take a monkey from a social group and dye his fur purple. When you put him back, the other monkeys will throw him out of the tree. Because he's different.
:-)
This behavior can most distinctly be seen on Metafilter, a site I don't even bother to participate in. If you are not (1) radically liberal and (2) distastefully sarcastic, you are not welcome there. As soon as your opinions become known, your remarks, no matter what the topic, will be met with derision and hostility.
This is both not as bad and much worse on Slashdot. It's not as bad because there's more diversity of opinion here, but it's much worse because Slashdot's "moderation" system makes it possible for unpopular opinions to be literally silenced, pushing them down below the threshold of visibility.
Collaborative content sites quickly become exclusive oligarchies.
Down with democracy.
I write in my journal
- better security through heavier use of digital signatures
- polling / voting, complete with:
- discussion forum logs
- the ability to change your vote as time goes on
- the ability to delegate your vote out to people you trust to uphold your interests
- all of that other auditability, transparency, and anonymity stuff you need
- issue ranking / prioritization / tracking
- taxation / donation / fund allocation / redistribution
it seems like it would be fairly straightforward to allow everyone to perform collaborative decision making mediated through a good blog-based "community operating system".This goes a little bit beyond simply "e-voting", but not too much given all of the other technologies available. It would also be funny to have a public record of all the flamewars that erupt in the process of sausage-making :P . But particularly because all that frank discussion would be there and wouldn't have to be revisited later down the line.
Anything like this out and about?
The analysis of rusty's March 26th announcement is shoddy. There never was anonymous posting on K5, and no "trials" for news users were announced. The announcement was that each new user would have to be sponsored by an existing user, and that if the new user was banned, the sponsor would be too.
Whatever the practicality of that, what actually happened is that since March 26th, new user registration on Kuro5hin has been closed. The sponsorship system has not been turned on (or implemented, although rusty claimed it was effectively done when he announced it). It's just closed. As of the time of writing, you cannot create a new account on Kuro5hin, and so you cannot post.
The catalyst for all this was some users posting links to a badly photoshopped fake image of rusty's wife's head on a porn body. rusty's reaction was instant and extreme. The accounts were banned and several other long term trolls were purged in the aftermath. To this day, the criteria for banning is still unclear.
It should be noted that rusty has previously removing rating abilities, banned and anonymised (i.e. wiped commands of) accounts, and IP blocked posters at his sole whim and discretion. The freedom of Kuro5hin is the freedom to things rusty's way or not at all. The trouble with having a benign dictator is that he's still a dictator. Without oversight, there's no security.
Of course, rusty can do whatever he wants with his site. Except that, in his own words, after taking $70K (or $35K or $45K or $80K or whichever of his various figures and calculationg that you want to believe) it's not his site. "I think the clearest way I can put it is: you just purchased Kuro5hin.org". Well, that's a funny kind of ownership.
K5 might recover. Stranger things have happened, and a (sketchy) article on prime numbers just made it to the front page, so there are still non-trolls there. They just don't contribute much content any more.
In the long term though, it can't recover its past popularity without new users, that's for damn sure. The salient lesson: dictators are never a good idea, no matter how benign. In fact, the more benign they appear, the harder they can finally snap.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Not to mention dangerous! Who knows what kind of freaky loops the recursive Slashdot effect can get us into... it may cause warps in the time/space curve, or something!
The problem with E2 is that users 'own' whatever they post. You have a ton of nodes that, while good, haven't been updated in years and nobody really visits them. E2 is really just a stupid contest to see who can get the most points. People try to be real witty so they can game the system and gain more powers. The editors also tend to be insular and elitist, in contrast to Wikipedia's almost fanatical permissiveness and acceptance of new contributors.
I hung out on half-empty for a while, but eventually stopped going there, I guess partly because almost everybody there was a college student, and I didn't feel like I had much in common with them. (I'm 38, and have a family.) The new half-empty.org seems cool (just created an account today), but it seems to have a completely different focus (reviews).
Kuro5hin was cool, but now it's dead. I don't have any hard feelings against Rusty, but he clearly got frustrated and intentionally killed it off. (I did subsidize the site slightly by buying ads, but I hope nobody is under the impression that the money people gave Rusty even came close to paying for the time, money, and anguish he put into the site.)
Husi seems to be a nice Scoop site, but it's got extremely low traffic so far. It'd be nice to see it take off. Seems to have a UK focus, though.
Find free books.
Yeah, there's the occasional really interesting /. comment that gets nuked off of the face of the earth- but all too frequently, there's an assload of repetetive and redundant comments that get modded up.... and damned near all of the "Funny" posts are just NOT funny. At all.
I love the fact I can twiddle my user prefs to smack a -5 on "Funny" mods and a +3 on "redundant". It's not perfect, but it kicks a hell of a lot more ass than the k5 mod system, imo.
True,
but if you make people your "friends" you can get messages whenever they update their blogs.
The slashcode could use some more features to bring prominent discussions and journals to the front page. (Like a slashbox with newest journal entries, etc.)
If there's too few topics on the front page, there's the Sections in the left menu, which sometimes carry more stories than reach the front page.
Then there's the
Other discussions, some of whom are not related to a story and can function as sub-group blogs.
Here are some active blogs:
BlackHat
Red Warrior
frankie
I'm sure others can reply with more active blog users.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Ok to be honest I didn't have the patience to read this whole thing but I did post it as a Quick Link on Plastic, one of the sites referenced (and of which I am a frequent user)
Now I am sitting in Plastic Chat, watching people comment on the paper. It seems as if the author has barely spent any time on Plastic, and he seems to have missed the forrest for the trees (as in, he looked at details, decided he didn't like them. Meanwhile all these features added up together make for a pretty nice, relatively diverse community/discussion)
Not that I am encouraging you people to give Plastic a try. More like, I am commenting on the lack of thoroughness in the paper. Which, admitedly, I did not read.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
I would consider the moderation system to be the most broken part of Slashdot.
Overrated and Underrated mods don't get metamodded, so people always use it to follow your posts when they don't like you and mod them all down. This is a little known fact, for some reason. At least Taco made it so Funny mods don't affect karma, because 90% of the upmodded Funny posts aren't funny in the slightest bit.
If a ton of people mod you up to +5, it only takes one person to knock you down to +4, and their moderation type ("Troll") is the one displayed. The way it's designed leads to groupthink, where if someone interprets a post as a joke, it will be marked as "Funny," and from that point on others will see that "Funny" marker and also interpret as funny and mod it up. However, if it was originally marked as "Flamebait," others will see that marker and unconsciously interpret that way, causing them to skip over it or also mark it down.
Not to mention that going against any majority opinion around here is almost guaranteeing 99% of the time that you'll be modded down into oblivion for violating the hivemind. And Anti-Slash is always exploiting the flaws of the moderation system for its own amusement. They list their troll posts on the front page complete with links, and even have a searchable database storing past +5 posts that trolls can repost later on and get modded up (and they do, every time).
Not to mention the Slashdot editors have infinite moderation points and have abused this in the past--case in point, The Post. Several people have never gotten moderation points to this day simply because they posted a reply in that discussion. Michael has even insulted people for having a high post count. The guy who squatted Censorware and is the most despised and unprofessional editor at Slashdot actually makes fun of its devoted readers.
For a site that professes "openness" so much, the editors keep a lot hidden and don't talk very much to vistors (try e-mailing Taco sometime and expect either nothing at all or a very nasty sarcastic reply). Heck, if you even dare suggest that Slashdot move away from this ugly, godawful, absolutely horrible 1998-era visual design, the response is either nothing at all or "submit a patch if you want." Nice.
This place has been going down the crapper ever since VA Linux bought it out. Don't people realize this website is corporate-owned now? For all the anti-corporation spiel that goes on around here, I'm surprised that fact is ignored. Suddenly all the anti-"M$" posts are put into perspective. Must be nice for a company to own a "news" website that just so happens to post a lot of "news" articles negative toward competitors ("Microsoft Violates Human Rights In China").
There was a time when Kuro5hin was the alternative, and I used to visit that place back when they actually posted technology news that Slashdot wouldn't touch for whatever reason. But now Kuro5hin is a left-wing hellhole, where Bin Laden is a "misunderstood freedom fighter." The sad truth is that Slashdot is seen as the bastion for tech news in the geek community, and the fact that Taco shrugs off its relevance as "this is just a hobby" means we don't get any sort of professionalism at all, but instead more reposts, typos, completely false articles, and broken discussion systems.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Intelligent conversations, mostly about political issues. Not much "geek news" but I suppose that's what Slashdot is for.
I feel for Rusty from Kuro5hin...basically he closed his news site for the same reason I closed mine... crapflooder problems.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
To answer the question that seems to be hanging aroudn, Slashdot is a weblog. It is a log of interesting links on the web, and it's in reverse chronological order. It has permalinks to discreet posts, and the posts are ephemeral.
So why doesn't it seem like a weblog? Slashdot doesn't have as much of the personal voice as other weblogs, but that doesn't mean it doesn't count.
Not all weblogs are online journals, and just because you don't understand that is no reason to bash weblogs.
As to bashing online journals because you think that they're boring, that's a different rant. Short story is that just because they're boring and inane to you doesn't mean that they are to people who know and care about the subject.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Kuro5hin was dead 2 years ago. The body was still just twitching.
:)
Once it stopped being fun, Kuro5hin became something you participated in because you paid for it or were being paid to work on it. Once you weren't paid for it, you stopped caring. If you happened to be a person who paid for it, maybe you paid in a little more because you weren't sure. It took the remaining 2 years for all this to sort itself out.
Once it became about political speech that never really went anywhere (I'm not talking about interesting projects, like freenet, I'm talking about the people who wanted to protest, but never did outside of Kuro5hin), it was officially dead. Slashdot avoids this by having stricter control over the stories, but it also lacks the various tools that allowed users to find each other. I think that's part of what kept K5 going so long.
I'm not sure what will be the solution of a social site where people can post interesting things to a wider audience, and still managed to make friends and such. Livejournal seems to be a good example of this situation (it serves the purpose for me), but there isn't really an easy digest method that allows you to get into it -- you pretty much have to know someone using it, or sift through thousands of random, shitty journals before you find any of the social groups that are interesting.
I just hope I have a hand in making the next big thing
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Heh, I started replying to another post - got distracted - returned and rewrote the thing as a reply to the article. Then I posted it as a reply to that fellows comment. *sigh*
/. the way the interface works. Yet I have no problem navigating large discussions on Plastic. The difference in the two? Took me awhile but I think the thing that eases it for me is that they set the 'title' attribute on their links to stories and comments.
..."A gathering of strays" instead of "lost sheep."
I read and comment on Plastic way more than I ever did on Slashdot. Of course I did most of my slashdot commenting in the days before accounts were necessary. Not that I think things have changed too much - it's that the threads are all too large now it seems. I don't have any sense of communicating or community here. I think this is my third account because I keep forgetting the damn usernames and passwords - that's how seldom I think it worth it to log in. I still read here of course, but commenting seems to not add much value.
Simply too much 'stuff' to wade through on
Wha? No, really. When I mouse over the links I get a cute little 'tool tip' giving me a preview of the linked comment. When those links have their 'title' set to be the first n characters of text in the comment it makes it a lot easier to skim along and determine what's deserving of 'drilling down'. I mentioned this on slashdot before I'm sure.
It's a small thing but it makes navigating a thread much easier when you can quickly gauge the tone/value of replies without having to click on them all to open them in another window. It works wonders with reading short replies, deciding which comments to investigate first and helps with often meaningless subject lines like "Re:The thing this thread started as but it no longers bears any relation to'. It's surprising how used you get to depending on that little bit of introductory info. I constantly mouse over the links in huge Slashdot threads and am surprised everytime when nothing happens.
It's changed the way I read on Plastic, I now read many more of the comments to a story because I seldom get frustrated by chasing replies that are of no interest to me. It also lends itself to interesting idioms.
Take this example of a post. Subject line is bold and the first line of the comment body (which'll show up in the popup and completes the 'thought') is in italics
My wife calls this...
Now, I'm curious. Anyone else here discover a convenient UI feature that you wish more people used? There's probably lots of neat things going on out there that I've just been to lazy to notice.
Kevin
It seems to me that the people who are the biggest bloggers spend more time talking about the metamechanics of blogging, or about how wonderful blogging is than actually blogging.
It is tedious. The format is not the content, and the medium is not the message.
-- benton.