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.
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...
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!
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