Slashdot Mirror
The New Brat Pack of Silicon Valley
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek looks at the current entrepreneurs of Web 2.0 via the lens of Kevin Rose and Digg. Although the article focuses on the rise and success of Digg, it also looks at the ethos of Web 2.0 and its successful companies, including YouTube, Del.icio.us, Facebook and Xfire. From the article: 'Clearly much has changed since 1999, and Rose and his fellow wealth punks have little in common with the sharp-talking MBAs in crisp khakis and blue button-downs who rushed the Valley as the NASDAQ climbed. In the late 1990s, entrepreneurs were the supplicants, and Sand Hill Road, dotted with venture-capital firms, was the mecca. Dot-commers relied on VCs for the millions needed to buy hardware, rent servers, hire designers, and advertise like crazy to bring in the eyeballs. For their big stakes of, say, $15 million for 20% of a company, venture capitalists received board seats, control of the management levers, and most of the equity. Now, it's more like: Maybe we'll let you throw a few bucks our way -- if you get it. Otherwise, get lost.'"
Meet the new web, same as the old web.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...a bitter and angry Rob Malda told reports looking for a quote to "Get the hell off my lawn".
1992 called. They want their inflated ego back
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
...the more they get the lame. And nothing is lamer than Digg and Kevin.
OK, in all fairness here's where I stand on Digg vs. Slashdot:
-Sort through the massive amount of crap on Digg for the latest news bits that might be worthwhile. On Digg it'a all about quantity, not quality. Or to put it another way, "How do we do it? VOLUME"!!!
-Hit Slashdot and find that some of the stories you found interesting on Digg are featured here and there is a better quality of discussion (amazingly) than there is on Digg. So this is where you get social. Digg is just an unsorted pile of crap.
-Yeah, I'm aware that the stories are "voted" to the front page by the readers. That's fine as long as your readers aren't idiots. The more popular Digg gets, the more idiots they collect. Therefore the quality of the front page represents what the idiots want to see. Not what actual, thinking readers are interested in.
Now, what I can also thank Digg for is the effect it's had on Slashdot. Not so much internally, but externally. I don't give a rat's ass if Taco and crew are scrambling to try and compete with Digg. That's not the effect I'm talking about. I'm talking about the somewhat homeopathic effect they've had on Slashdot. By becoming more popular, they've lured away most of the idiots. I've noticed that the level of discussion on Slashdot has improved since Digg 3.0 was unleashed. I think that a lot of the morons who annoyed the piss out of me after Slashdot became popular (I've been here since 1997 when I used to be CaptEno) couldn't resist that suction of stupid that Digg presented. The only negative effect I've seen is much slower story submission. Whereas the stories used to tick by quickly, now we're lucky if we see five new stories in a day.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Techdirt puts this article into nice perspective.
Yeah he's got several million dollars and you've got a free t-shirt.
Wow, he sure is lame.