Rolan was the first one to write with the heads-up about Wired's story about Slashdot-things are in much the same vein as other stories, but give it a gander if you'd like. And stop submitting the story *grin*.
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired. I can go read news.com and wired.com in the morning, and in the afternoon there will be 3 or 4 stories posted (on Slashdot) that just point back to those. If anything, maybe Slashdot is a good way to, er, gather together the more interesting news and comment on it, but they're not 'scooping' anyone, except for when they post major software releases before they're supposed to be released, so the mirrors haven't gotten their copies yet, and the hordes kill the main site and the mirrors never get their copies.
Mix in the occasional JonKatz yellowish journalism (it's designed to create controversy and draw more hits/pageviews/ad loads), an article a day about "amazing high storage at amazingly low price sometime in the future" (I swear, there's at least one of these a day), and ever so often an empty essay from a slashdot reader or a book review.
And of course Slashdot "coexists" with the traditional news sites -- it's where they get half their stories.
[But, hey, I read it for the comments.]
-- ---
Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
Conventional journalism as "reliable".
by
nyet
·
· Score: 3
It amazes me that conventional journalists have the gall to repeat this mantra over and over again. Every single time the "conventional" news media covers a story that I, or a good friend, have personal knowledge of, they invariably screw it up and add some bizzare audience grabbing spin to it. EVERY TIME. And this isn't just for "nerd" or technical news. Anything is fair game.
It makes you wonder about the rest of the "honest", "reliable", "unbiased" journalism they churn out that you don't have a way to independantly verify. Sure, its not all malicious and/or self serving munging of the news, but anything that can't be attributed to a conspiracy can certainly be attributed to plain laziness.
And speaking of "un-biased" journalism... as long as the medium, or reporter, or whatever at LEAST has their "bias" out in the open, I know exactly what I'm in for. Stories that have that "I'm totally unbiased, just reporting the facts because its my job" style invariably give me the heebie jeebies.
Wired almost gets it right. Kudos to /. again
by
CodeShark
·
· Score: 3
Like other posters/readers, etc. I think that/. does a much better job of depth reporting and analysis than Wired, Salon, etc. and that Rob is just being a little too humble when he says that/. isn't all that deep.
Numerous examples come to mind:
When an "Ask Slashdot" question gets going, often a new project or project direction will open up, improving Linux and Open Source in the process.
When a video card mfr or other board maker gets feedback from the screaming Linux masses via/. that we'd love to use their product -- if only it was Linux compatible...
When a new kernel, security item, or OS product is released for testing,/. often tips us off, and we all go bang the heck out of the code, resulting in fast bug detection.
When quasi- and various- governmental agencies screw up,/. blows the whistle and we nail them with the Slashdot Effect.
A more "mainsteam" f's up a story --/. not only gets the corrections (via more clued in posters), we often submit replies to the mainstream media which ofter lucid, well thought out counterpoints to the original articles.
Finally, we compete with the Beast From Redmond by making sure that other OS's and technologies get adequate, honest reporting.
Not bad for (as Wired puts it) "a three-person web site" in the middle of Michigan, eh? It used to be "....news at 11 (p.m.)...." IMHO what we're seeing here is....
Slashdot--- the future of interactive journalism...why the hell wait 'til 11!!
-- ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
If you look at articles like the recent one on evolution that split the readers into factions, something kind of different appears. I would bet that people trusted different "experts" in their evaluation of the comments following the article, depending on their own predisposition on the matter.
Slashdot sometimes provides a multi-valued filter on stories. There are well written conflicting comments that are highly rated. I find this more interesting and yes, entertaining, than a traditional news source promoting just one view.
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
As far as I'm concerned he's got it backwards. When I see a Wired News story posted on Slashdot, I usually read the story, then read through the comments looking for someone who knows more about the story's subject than the author (and I usually find such a person).
With as many readers as Slashdot has we're bound to have SOMEBODY with more experience with a technical project, phenomenon or area of study than the author, who, well, sits in an office writing all day.
-- /* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
On the subject of Breadth vs. Depth:
by
fable2112
·
· Score: 4
IMHO, too much of either is bad. Rob is quoted as saying that now "we know a lot about a little," rather than vice-versa.
I've seen many posts here on/. complaining that the focus here should be narrower than it is -- Star Wars, the Hellmouth series, etc aren't really "news for nerds," in their view.
Needless to say, I disagree. As I've posted in the past, a purely Linux-focused or even computer-focused site only makes sense if "computer" is a necessary and therefore unstated modifier of "nerd." It is not. I am an English nerd (aka technical writer with a journalism degree), and I'm sure there are more of us here, as well as a good-sized handful of "science nerds," etc.
I think that/. strikes a relatively good balance between having a main focus and having a reasonable breadth and diversity of news. (In other words, I don't think/. is necessarily "a lot about a little" -- don't sell yourself short, Rob!)
And I think the not-strictly-computer threads are necessary in much the same way that in the SCA, you can't become a knight JUST because you're a good fighter, even though fighting is the main focus of the knighthood. At a minimum, you're also expected to teach fighters, and to know how to dance, play chess, and some other things I'm forgetting right now.;)
Super-hyper-overspecialization isn't a very good thing -- we still need common ground with the rest of the world. But having a major focus, and supplementing with bits and pieces slightly outside of that focus that are still interesting, is a good way to go. I like and appreciate it.:)
-- "Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today... but it wasn't anybody I knew" -The Moody Blues, "Dear Diar
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority.
I found this facinating... There is, of course, a very good system in action right here. It is caled a "username". When combined with a "brain", it allows the reader to determine whether to trust articles written by someone who they've already read before.
Seems to me this used to be the way the "old" media worked.
Anyway, I find this "old media" fascination with the need for a "trusted" source ironic in the sense that the biggest problem they face right now is a complete lack of trust among the general population. I don't for a second trust any of those I see talk about the need for sources that can be "trusted".
To use a sadder example of web journalism, Matt Drudge, while completely lacking in the sort of reputation that would earn my trust is no different from the mainstream media in this respect. I see people I have no trust in complain about how Drudge isn't a "real journalist" because he is not trustworthy. Well, yeah... That's what makes him a journalist.
I trust those who post to slashdot to the extent that I can check them out, and to what checking I've done, posters here are often more accurate, and more inciteful, then anything in the "mainstream" media. It is nice to have a media outlet that actually pokes bullshit stories full of holes within the hour. This is far better than the idiocy that gets printed in most newspapers or news magazines today.
--
The cake is a pie
One of the more telling comments...
by
Maledictus
·
· Score: 3
...is from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNN Tech news.
"The slant is so weird," Foley said, citing a recent Slashdot-linked interview on the Microsoft Web site. "What they highlight from the interview is not what a journalist would highlight. They like to highlight things that make Microsoft look stupid."
Again -- "What they highlight...is not what a journalist would highlight." So? Is that supposed to detract from/.'s credibility somehow? Does Mary Jo Foley have some sort of omniscience that is granted to all journalism graduates that makes what she and others would "highlight" something I need to know, even something I need to live my technical life by? What about the things journalists wouldn't "highlight?" Are those issues that we don't need to worry our pretty little heads about?
She then goes on to say that she checks/. five times a day...heh. To see what she should have "highlighted" I guess.
I have bookmarked Salon, Upside, Andover, CNet, Ars Technia, Macintouch, Slashdot, TechWeb, and The Motley Fool, among others. And what isn't bookmarked is usually found as a link from one of these sites. All have different styles, different priorities and all -- including and especially the "traditional" news avenues -- highlight different issues. After I sift and filter, I think I come up with my business and technical best guess. But without the "non-traditional" avenues, I don't think I'd have the whole story. The inside, "hey, we're sittin' here working with this stuff" story.
And I'm not some kid surfing around for kicks in the basement of the university computer building. I'm an administrative type that recommends and makes hardware purchases -- things like multiple midrange servers, workstations of all flavors, manufacturing shop floor data collection software...but I digress. The point is, I take my technology news seriously because I buy stuff and management expects that stuff to work. I track the technology market from here, among other places.
I guess that makes/. "weird."
-- Consigned to flames of woe.
Nobody scoops anybody (almost)
by
dillon_rinker
·
· Score: 4
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired
i agree, BUT...
Almost all of the tech news I read fits into one of these categories:
1. Rehash of some company's press release "Cool new product (tm) available Real Soon Now" (I used to work for Gateway and was both saddened and amused when corporate press releases were reworded slightly and printed under a tech reporter's byline major PC magazines).
2. Rehash of come company's financial statement - or "UberTeq posts record sales".
3. Media / corporate collaboration to produce "news" (ZD anyone?).
4. Opinion pieces, where one person lets their thought ricochet around their skull and writes about it. The level of interestingness depends on the cluefulness of the writer.
5. The reporter talked to someone who knew something and then wrote about it.
In short, there is very little originality in tech journalism. Slashdot makes an excellent filter for categories 1-3, and produces categories 4-5 by default.
Absence of Editorial Supervision?
by
dave_aiello
·
· Score: 3
The Wired article says:
"In this model you don't have editors deciding what is legitimate and what isn't," said Jonathan Dube, a senior associate producer with ABCNews.com.
What are CmdrTaco and Hemos doing when they decide which stories to post? Aren't they serving as editors, and determining what is legitimate and what isn't?
I liked this story but mostly I was interested in the views of the journalists interviewed. My favorite was the derision of the stories because there is no editor to look things over and approve them. This shows a clear lack of understanding of the process of sites like Slashdot. A perfect example was the story on the 25th about the supposed "new" way the guy found to make the ipv4 address structure last longer. I don't really have the know-how to know if this was alright or not (beyond the horrible grammar) but within 30 minutes of reading the comments here, I knew it was crap because I had a hundred people way more knowledgeable than I am reading the story and picking it apart. There's no way to do something like that in a traditional news source. They expect us to trust our info to some editor we are completely unfamiliar with, no thanks. What made me laugh the most was the fact that the reporter talked about how Slashdot was unreliable, then she says she checks the site 5 times a day looking for news. I guess as soon as she reports it the news will be reliable?
Slashdot Mirror
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired. I can go read news.com and wired.com in the morning, and in the afternoon there will be 3 or 4 stories posted (on Slashdot) that just point back to those. If anything, maybe Slashdot is a good way to, er, gather together the more interesting news and comment on it, but they're not 'scooping' anyone, except for when they post major software releases before they're supposed to be released, so the mirrors haven't gotten their copies yet, and the hordes kill the main site and the mirrors never get their copies.
Mix in the occasional JonKatz yellowish journalism (it's designed to create controversy and draw more hits/pageviews/ad loads), an article a day about "amazing high storage at amazingly low price sometime in the future" (I swear, there's at least one of these a day), and ever so often an empty essay from a slashdot reader or a book review.
And of course Slashdot "coexists" with the traditional news sites -- it's where they get half their stories.
[But, hey, I read it for the comments.]
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
It amazes me that conventional journalists have the gall to repeat this mantra over and over again. Every single time the "conventional" news media covers a story that I, or a good friend, have personal knowledge of, they invariably screw it up and add some bizzare audience grabbing spin to it. EVERY TIME. And this isn't just for "nerd" or technical news. Anything is fair game.
It makes you wonder about the rest of the "honest", "reliable", "unbiased" journalism they churn out that you don't have a way to independantly verify. Sure, its not all malicious and/or self serving munging of the news, but anything that can't be attributed to a conspiracy can certainly be attributed to plain laziness.
And speaking of "un-biased" journalism... as long as the medium, or reporter, or whatever at LEAST has their "bias" out in the open, I know exactly what I'm in for. Stories that have that "I'm totally unbiased, just reporting the facts because its my job" style invariably give me the heebie jeebies.
Numerous examples come to mind:
- When an "Ask Slashdot" question gets going, often a new project or project direction will open up, improving Linux and Open Source in the process.
- When a video card mfr or other board maker gets feedback from the screaming Linux masses via
/. that we'd love to use their product -- if only it was Linux compatible... - When a new kernel, security item, or OS product is released for testing,
/. often tips us off, and we all go bang the heck out of the code, resulting in fast bug detection. - When quasi- and various- governmental agencies screw up,
/. blows the whistle and we nail them with the Slashdot Effect. - A more "mainsteam" f's up a story --
/. not only gets the corrections (via more clued in posters), we often submit replies to the mainstream media which ofter lucid, well thought out counterpoints to the original articles. - Finally, we compete with the Beast From Redmond by making sure that other OS's and technologies get adequate, honest reporting.
Not bad for (as Wired puts it) "a three-person web site" in the middle of Michigan, eh? It used to be "....news at 11 (p.m.)...." IMHO what we're seeing here is....Slashdot--- the future of interactive journalism...why the hell wait 'til 11!!
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
If you look at articles like the recent one on evolution that split the readers into factions, something kind of different appears. I would bet that people trusted different "experts" in their evaluation of the comments following the article, depending on their own predisposition on the matter.
Slashdot sometimes provides a multi-valued filter on stories. There are well written conflicting comments that are highly rated. I find this more interesting and yes, entertaining, than a traditional news source promoting just one view.
Jim
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
As far as I'm concerned he's got it backwards. When I see a Wired News story posted on Slashdot, I usually read the story, then read through the comments looking for someone who knows more about the story's subject than the author (and I usually find such a person).
With as many readers as Slashdot has we're bound to have SOMEBODY with more experience with a technical project, phenomenon or area of study than the author, who, well, sits in an office writing all day.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
IMHO, too much of either is bad. Rob is quoted as saying that now "we know a lot about a little," rather than vice-versa.
I've seen many posts here on
Needless to say, I disagree. As I've posted in the past, a purely Linux-focused or even computer-focused site only makes sense if "computer" is a necessary and therefore unstated modifier of "nerd." It is not. I am an English nerd (aka technical writer with a journalism degree), and I'm sure there are more of us here, as well as a good-sized handful of "science nerds," etc.
I think that
And I think the not-strictly-computer threads are necessary in much the same way that in the SCA, you can't become a knight JUST because you're a good fighter, even though fighting is the main focus of the knighthood. At a minimum, you're also expected to teach fighters, and to know how to dance, play chess, and some other things I'm forgetting right now.
Super-hyper-overspecialization isn't a very good thing -- we still need common ground with the rest of the world. But having a major focus, and supplementing with bits and pieces slightly outside of that focus that are still interesting, is a good way to go. I like and appreciate it.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority.
I found this facinating... There is, of course, a very good system in action right here. It is caled a "username". When combined with a "brain", it allows the reader to determine whether to trust articles written by someone who they've already read before.
Seems to me this used to be the way the "old" media worked.
Anyway, I find this "old media" fascination with the need for a "trusted" source ironic in the sense that the biggest problem they face right now is a complete lack of trust among the general population. I don't for a second trust any of those I see talk about the need for sources that can be "trusted".
To use a sadder example of web journalism, Matt Drudge, while completely lacking in the sort of reputation that would earn my trust is no different from the mainstream media in this respect. I see people I have no trust in complain about how Drudge isn't a "real journalist" because he is not trustworthy. Well, yeah... That's what makes him a journalist.
I trust those who post to slashdot to the extent that I can check them out, and to what checking I've done, posters here are often more accurate, and more inciteful, then anything in the "mainstream" media. It is nice to have a media outlet that actually pokes bullshit stories full of holes within the hour. This is far better than the idiocy that gets printed in most newspapers or news magazines today.
The cake is a pie
...is from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNN Tech news.
/.'s credibility somehow? Does Mary Jo Foley have some sort of omniscience that is granted to all journalism graduates that makes what she and others would "highlight" something I need to know, even something I need to live my technical life by? What about the things journalists wouldn't "highlight?" Are those issues that we don't need to worry our pretty little heads about?
/. five times a day...heh. To see what she should have "highlighted" I guess.
/. "weird."
"The slant is so weird," Foley said, citing a recent Slashdot-linked interview on the Microsoft Web site. "What they highlight from the interview is not what a journalist would highlight. They like to highlight things that make Microsoft look stupid."
Again -- "What they highlight...is not what a journalist would highlight." So? Is that supposed to detract from
She then goes on to say that she checks
I have bookmarked Salon, Upside, Andover, CNet, Ars Technia, Macintouch, Slashdot, TechWeb, and The Motley Fool, among others. And what isn't bookmarked is usually found as a link from one of these sites. All have different styles, different priorities and all -- including and especially the "traditional" news avenues -- highlight different issues. After I sift and filter, I think I come up with my business and technical best guess. But without the "non-traditional" avenues, I don't think I'd have the whole story. The inside, "hey, we're sittin' here working with this stuff" story.
And I'm not some kid surfing around for kicks in the basement of the university computer building. I'm an administrative type that recommends and makes hardware purchases -- things like multiple midrange servers, workstations of all flavors, manufacturing shop floor data collection software...but I digress. The point is, I take my technology news seriously because I buy stuff and management expects that stuff to work. I track the technology market from here, among other places.
I guess that makes
Consigned to flames of woe.
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired
i agree, BUT...
Almost all of the tech news I read fits into one of these categories:
1. Rehash of some company's press release "Cool new product (tm) available Real Soon Now" (I used to work for Gateway and was both saddened and amused when corporate press releases were reworded slightly and printed under a tech reporter's byline major PC magazines).
2. Rehash of come company's financial statement - or "UberTeq posts record sales".
3. Media / corporate collaboration to produce "news" (ZD anyone?).
4. Opinion pieces, where one person lets their thought ricochet around their skull and writes about it. The level of interestingness depends on the cluefulness of the writer.
5. The reporter talked to someone who knew something and then wrote about it.
In short, there is very little originality in tech journalism. Slashdot makes an excellent filter for categories 1-3, and produces categories 4-5 by default.
What are CmdrTaco and Hemos doing when they decide which stories to post? Aren't they serving as editors, and determining what is legitimate and what isn't?
-- Dave Aiello
I liked this story but mostly I was interested in the views of the journalists interviewed. My favorite was the derision of the stories because there is no editor to look things over and approve them. This shows a clear lack of understanding of the process of sites like Slashdot. A perfect example was the story on the 25th about the supposed "new" way the guy found to make the ipv4 address structure last longer. I don't really have the know-how to know if this was alright or not (beyond the horrible grammar) but within 30 minutes of reading the comments here, I knew it was crap because I had a hundred people way more knowledgeable than I am reading the story and picking it apart. There's no way to do something like that in a traditional news source. They expect us to trust our info to some editor we are completely unfamiliar with, no thanks. What made me laugh the most was the fact that the reporter talked about how Slashdot was unreliable, then she says she checks the site 5 times a day looking for news. I guess as soon as she reports it the news will be reliable?