Slashdot Mirror
New Consortium to Push UDI and Include DRM
MarsGov writes "Intel, Apple, Samsung, LG, Nat Semi and Silicon Image formed a consortium to promote Unified Display Interface (UDI) as the new standard to connect computers to monitors and TVs. UDI will be HDMI and HDCP "anti-piracy" compatible. "
I saw this on digg.com and yes, I know this is OT, but I also know that it will never get past the janitors...
Is Slashdot dying?
Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 9:40 am by John Berry
Slashdot has long been a significant source of daily news for the tech community (dupes, typos, trolls and all). Over the past year, however, I've noticed a gradual decrease in its importance as a source of information. Others around me have echoed similar thoughts, so I gathered some statistics to see if this is a growing trend.
Without access to long-term Slashdot usage metrics, I looked at the number of comments per story for the last 7 years by writing a few scripts to walk through the Slashdot daily archives, cache them locally, parse the data and then generate a file with the output.
There appears to be fairly significant falloff of average comments per story at the beginning of both 2004 and 2005. I also graphed the output of each day's average comments per post as an xy scatter, reflected below with a trendline.
Note that the count for 9/11/2001 is not drawn (but included in the calculations), as it is exceptionally large.
This second graph reinforces the initial observation that community activity is on the decline.
Why is this happening?
The habits of those around me indicate that the decline in Slashdot activity is due to the following:
* Broad adoption of RSS: Feeds are ubiquitous, and the result is that everyone can easily customize their daily information exposure -- much more precisely than CmdrTaco and the boys can.
* Emergence of social applications: Yep. Web2.0 apps are killing Slashdot. Relying on the community to process information relevance for individual consumption is a hell of a lot more efficient than Slashdot's closed door approach (open source indeed). Sites like digg.com and the del.icio.us/popular are far more reliable indicators of what is being talked about.
See Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot at wired.com and The Rise of Digg.com on Slashdot.
What does this mean?
Each of the above linked stories suggest that users are relying on digg for timely information, and go to Slashdot when they want insightful commentary (digg and del.icio.us are for tuning in, Slashdot is for participating). This would imply a drop-off in visitor traffic, but not necessarily community activity (which we obviously see is happening). A sustained decline in both traffic and participation would be bad signs indeed.
If the pool of comments continues to drop, I suspect the signal-to-noise ratio will take an unfavorable turn. If Slashdot can't do fast, and if it has no community, what remains?
I'll to continue to track comment activity every few months to see if the trend continues.
Remember : Buck Fush.
Quagmire accomplished.
Sincerely as always,
Kilgore Trout, M.D.
Wwooooooo. Your such bad boy! And I thought I was top dog around town when I rape young girls.
Seriously, our legal priorities in this country are FUCKED UP! Can we please reserve harsh punishments for the true "scum of the earth" type people?
Life is not for the lazy.
I tried asking this question on another article's thread (namely the polar bears drowning thingy) and some yahoo modded me -1 Overrated. OVERRATED!?! not even offtopic!
Now I want some answers, and I'm not the only one.
We will storm the servers, make our voices heard!!
Who's with me??
erm... guys?
guys...?