Dan Gillmor on Slashdot

Normally I reserve stories about Slashdot to the quickies bin, but this article is getting submitted so many times that if I don't post it, I'll spend the rest of the day deleting it from the submissions box. Bill Longabaugh wrote in to send us a piece by Dan Gillmor over at the San Jose Mercury News about Slashdot. It's a nice little 'Slashdot as a weblog' piece apparently designed to stroke my ego. Update: 05/25 03:42 by CT : I've begun rewriting the Moderator Guidelines, so if you're interested, please check them out and submit comments (or diffs :)

Comments

Re:A few comments

[Anonymous Coward]

I think both Gillmor and you make some good points. Personally, I think Slashdot is, along with its ilk, one of the few sites that really makes use of this young medium, the web, as it should be. Whenever a new medium comes along, people tend to use it like they used the old ones: early movies were like filmed plays, and in the music business, it took a long time before people understood that a recording didn't have to sound just like a live act. Too much of what currently exists on the web is derived either from print media (noninteractive and bo-ring) or from TV (a hideous, bandwidth-sucking you-must-be-using-MSIE-to-view-this-site experience). Both are bad fits for the new medium.

I really think that in a way, Rob is a kind of visionary, because sites like Slashdot and Everything are among the first to really use the web _as_ the web, taking full(?) advantage of its capabilities, and not simply as a kind of magazine printed with electrons. Hence the buzz.

Re:A few comments

[Isaac-Lew]

However, it would be nice to see more 'original content' on Slashdot though, if only to avoid giving Jon Katz a monopoly.

How about a "User Opinion" section (where average joes could submit *their* long-winded, self-sevring articles? :)

Learning to take compliments

[gavinhall]

Posted by Mike@ABC:

I thought Dan's article was a good one. As a tech media type, I lurk on Slashdot often, because Rob and Hemos do a good job of getting a whole bunch of relevant info in one place. And the comments are good too, because you guys can smell BS a mile away, and it helps me sniff it out, too.

Is Slashdot journalism? Depends on how you define it. But I do think it hearkens back to the first days of publishing, before corporations took over -- when anyone with access to a printing press could change the way people thought about the issues in their lives. The founding fathers wrote the First Amendment for sites like this one.

And Rob...it was a nice column. Smile, take the compliment, and move on!

I don't think so.

[Evro]

Before you start flaming away, think about the huge differences between an organization like Slashdot and one like the NY Times. The Times and the other newspapers have squads of reporters that go out, find stories, then write the articles to inform the public. Slashdot has squads of people who go out and find the articles that those reporters wrote. Journalism isn't linking to stories other people wrote, it's the original stories. How often do we see "CmdrTaco on location in Kosovo," or "Hemos interviews Linus Torvalds"?

Now please don't think I am trying to put Slashdot down in any way. But I don't think it's journalism in the true sense of the word. It still depends about 99% on the work of others. Reporters do most of their own work.

-----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
Evan

A few comments

[ravenskana]

Interesting article, ego stroking or no.

Some impressions:
For the people who care, though, it's a must-visit place, almost addictive in its drawing power. And in the process Slashdot has become an archetype of the Internet-led communication revolution.

This is an important point, but doesn't go far enough. Slashdot is constantly improving, especially with the feedback from users. It feels more like Usenet (Usenet of about five years ago -- today's Usenet is much noiser, but that's another topic...) than a 'weblog,' 'portal,' or whatever neologism is being hyped.

[Weblogs] are the model of convenience: digests that take you directly to the original, expanded material if you care to learn more.

I often get "look at this" emails where friends of mine try to keep me informed on interesting things. Sadly, most of them tend to be of the urban legends I heard of three years ago, and/or even older 'joke lists'. The only ones that catch my attention are articles culled from one weblog or another, and usually I've already seen them here on Slashdot or Memepool, etc.

Reporting in newspapers today is usually not much more than copying things from the Associated Press (AP). As such, the dozen or so newspapers I could look at in a day are generally useless, as 90 percent of the info in one is duplicated in another. Weblogs are the closest thing to the AP the web has, but because there is no one standard yet it is still worthwhile to visit many sites, especially when they focus on one area or genre.

readers can set up the forums to show the most relevant -- or, if they prefer, the newest or oldest -- comments first.

Half the fun is configuring Slashdot to our will. We're a bunch of feature junkies. :)

I've heard Slashdot called a form of journalism, which seems a bit of a stretch apart from its homegrown essays. But I'm not willing to say it isn't journalism, either.

Again, the AP is relevant here as well -- most of the news in the local paper, especially the 'front page' is pulled from the AP, and the local reporters do little. Perhaps in larger cities this isn't true, but in Smalltown, USA, reporters don't do a lot of reporting.

However, it would be nice to see more 'original content' on Slashdot though, if only to avoid giving Jon Katz a monopoly.

Better than journalism

[DonkPunch]

IMHO, forums like slashdot are BETTER than journalism:

1) They allow relatively unfiltered feedback from the readers (vs. a few select letters that make it to the OpEd section of the newspaper).

2) There is no pretense that slashdot is unbiased. To me, this is preferable to supposedly unbiased journalism that subtlely reflects the journalist's own opinions. Selective reporting and coloring of facts is more insidious than simply saying, "Hey, we like *BSD and Linux around here."

3) Generally, the people delivering and commenting on the information know what they are talking about. In the slashdot forum, disinformation and marketing BS are usually caught quickly. More than once, slashdot posters have pointed out inaccurate and misleading info that most journalists would miss (*cough* *Mindcraft* *cough*).

Yes, there is a fair amount of noise, flamage, and immaturity. That comes with having an open forum. I'll take that over polished, edited, and filtered slickness any day. Heck, I read those -1 posts.

A "weblog" is a talk show gone online.

[AtariDatacenter]

One parallel that the author didn't catch is that the "weblog", like Slashdot, is interesting to many people because it is the online synonym of the talk-show. A topic is discussed, and the audience gets to react. (Actually, the "McLaughlin Group" would make for a better comparison.)

But for nerds, it is much better than a talk show. Not only is the initial presentation of the topic far more developed (the story or site being linked to), but the audience participation is far FAR more involved. And the subject matter is more intelligent. But let's face it, the 'audience participation' is what makes Slashdot so interesting to many of us.