Slashdot Mirror
BBC Documentary About Slashdot
Well, we usually shy away from projects like this, but the concept that the BBC has is both intelligent and interesting. They are doing a series about electronic communities called Digitribes and would like to do a show (1 of 6) about Slashdot. Click below for more information about the documentary and how you can help. They are looking especially for readers from the United Kingdom, but would like to hear from people worldwide as well.
Want to appear in a BBC Documentary?
World of Wonder are currently developing a 6 part TV project for the BBC called Digitribes that will give voice to different communities whose existence has only been made possible through the internet.
We're interested in featuring Slashdot in one programme and are looking for a wide range of interesting characters from this community that we could potentially feature. If you are interested in appearing in the programme please get in touch by email (ryee@worldofwonder.net) as soon as possible. In order to give me an idea of your character, the following information would be helpful when replying.
- A brief biography and description of yourself.
- The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
- Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
- An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
- How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
Slashdot is a community, but not a highly social community. We're more like a continuous panel discussion; whereas these questions are geared more towards people who play on MU*'s and other, more social fora (bulletin boards and IRC come to mind). Note especially this quote, which can be taken in more than one way:
In order to give me an idea of your character, the following information would be helpful when replying.
This could mean your personal character (morals, ethics, personality) *or* it could mean a "fronted" or role-played character, an identity you assume. I would suggest, in replying to these people, that everyone include this revised information:
1. A brief biography and description of yourself (This one's okay as-is, I think)
2. Where you first heard of Slashdot (as opposed to how you became interested.. as the header says, "News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters.")
3. Any interesting anecdotes from your time reading Slashdot (as opposed to time *in* it)
4. An explanation of what Slashdot and its community means to you, and what lasting impressions it has made on you (as opposed to just friendships)
5. How Slashdot affects your daily life, especially contrasting times you participate and times you don't (After all, Slashdot doesn't encourage the making and playing of alternate identities like a focused role-playing community would.)
I have first-posted more times than I can count.
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
I'd heard it was a GREAT website (for first posting).
Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
I once first posted but then it turned out I was really the second poster.
An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
I used to first post on lesser web pages. Here on slashdot I found numerous challenges to first posting successfully (i.e. other first posters). And these obstacles are realy just opportunities for fine-tuning my first-posting techniques.
How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
I have no life outside of slashdot. Without first posting I don't know what I'd do (probably invent first posting)
Just correcting a few inaccuracies.
;) Many of my favourite programs are on the BBC.
1) The BBC is losing badly to ITV in the ratings, but not to Channel 5. They ONCE had a program on which got similar ratings.
2) The BBC isn't so much nervous about the digital market as eager to participate in it. Just like people with colour tvs pay more than those with Black and White, the BBC wants people with digital to pay more than those without. Assuming you accept the licence fee as a good idea (which of course not all people do) then this seems quite reasonable.
3) The quality of BBC programs. Well if its an opinion then its not a fact.
All that said I`m always suspicious when other media wants to do programs on the internet. But the BBC has a better record on this than most.
But this guy does not work for the BBC. He works for an independent contractor called "World of Wonder" who presumably do documentaries to order. Most of these people are in fact ex-BBC people who went independent during the downsizing and now act as jobbing film makers, mostly for their former employer, but also for anyone else who needs their skills. This makes the whole broadcasting industry more flexible, and is generally a Good Thing.
As for World of Wonder's email server, it might go down, or they might pick up their email from their ISP.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
"down there in Europe"? Where are you? In orbit?
We're to the East of the USA not underneath them.
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
Well, its official. Slashdot has worked its way into the realm of the net cliche with its annointing by the Media Wise as an Official Internet Community (tm) (accept no substitute).
/. as a real, honest-to-goodness community. But that was back when I could identify 80% of the posters on the site, and I could predict the quality of a post solely on the nick attached to it. Back when a circle of 10 or 15 people were submitting the majority of the stories on the site. Those days are gone. Thousands of users and millions of hits after its advent, /. has lost all claim to community. It's still a very cool website, but it is not a community any more than the millions who read USA Today are a community.
Seriously, though...the reporters who are so intently discussing this latest classification are ultimately the pawns of the marketing forces that sweep the web today like ocean currents. Unable to win big with the concept of the "portal," the marketroids have transformed (read: renamed) their sites into "communities", thus providing the ever-so-important weekly buzzword (and warm fuzzy feeling) that keeps speculative internet stocks inflated to their astronomically high levels.
Perhaps at one point I would have bought into the idea of
I am community member 686 of 50,000. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Congradulations on the BBC thing, but even the BBC has a habit of commercializing things. I've always felt that the standard of post on Slashdot is much higher than average forums, but i hope that more press doesn't change that.
-- Moondog
What a lot of people forget is that a mass audience eventually evolves into a mediocracy which caters to the majority opinion (you know that big lump underneath the center of the bell curve) for the given cost. On the other hand, due to the lower transaction costs, the internet allows a niche audience to assemble which, with the right structure and feedback (thanks Rob for the debates on moderation), IMHO actually creates a meritocracy where the "best" (as judged by the /. audience karma criteria) ideas tend to surface and get more widely circulated. Thus more marginal and reflective opinions tend to be disseminated creating a richer and diverse base (still centered around the specialist niche though).
/.), especially when all contributors have an equal chance of submission. It has the advantage of allowing human nature to get on a soapbox and express itself without the fear of public speaking as well as a degree of anonymity. Also /. fits a void between the very large broadcast mediums catering to millions of people (TV, newspapers) and narrowcast mechanisms (chat rooms, bullitin boards, social clubs) which can only scale to hundreds. It will be interesting to see how /. will evolve over the next few years, especially as other groups start copying its format.
.... because it is neither rare nor well-done. :-)
For some people, access to any form of semi-intelligent debate is probably a significant improvement over the opinion pages of magazines and newspapers (the real competition to
ObJoke - why is TV a medium?
LL
The BBC usually rebroadcast a hand full of their current affairs, business and news programmes in Real Video/Audio format. BBC World Service is broadcast 24 hours a day in Streaming Quick Time 4 format.
Whilst I worked at the BBC, I found they didn't rebroadcast such specialist niche programmes in RealVideo format much, although the BBC Education site does have a wealth of multimedia material to view. Local Hero's being one brilliant example, also the Windrush Project.
Someone mentioned elsewhere about the BBC servers. Take it from me, it ain't a small operation ;-) Also, Beeb.com, the commercial wing of the BBC's online presence has outsources ALL it's servers to ICL. The set up is VAST.
-- Kaustav Bhattacharya - kaustav@kaustav.uk.com
Slashdot as a community? Anecdotes from your time "in" Slashdot? Friends you have made??
Send for Katz! He's their ideal subject. They deserve one another!
Ade_
/
(Does he still write for Slashdot? I wouldn't know, I filter his stuff.)
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
If the programme is re-broadcast in the USA, it'll probably be more sensored than the UK version. The commerical broadcasters, unlike the BBC, often sensor the truth if it stops them making more money! I guess this is true the world over.
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
.02
Read an article in The Australian [national, fairly conservative print press] on Geoffrey Bennet's success with getting the M$ refund which made reference to the story being picked up by 'online magazine SlashDot (which describes itself as "news for nerds")'. I'd never heard of Linux at this point, but being a good little sociologist who'd taken an interest in the role of intellectual property issues on the way people use 'emerging technologies' (that's the way sociologists describe the internet, sorry) the idea of an open source OS was pretty interesting. One click on 'I'm feeling lucky' at google later, here I was.
Six months of lurking & reading later, and a whole lot of rummaging around linked sites, and, well, I know a lot more than I did. I haven't written a line of code since high school fifteen years ago (C64 assembly : ), & I still haven't gotten around to installing Linux on something for a look & a play, but that's not really why I'm here. The articles that get posted here, the discussions that take place here represent the best source I've found on the thinking going on around the development of the technologies behind what the average punter experiences as 'technological progress'. Traditional print press & broadcast media do report on technology, and even on the cultural impacts of technology, but usually in a reactive way and, with few exceptions, without the benefit of any real expertise in the area. I've never seen a discussion in the print press on, for example, gift economies. I've almost never seen a discussion on the business models that can make something like open source development financially viable in 'the real world'. And I've certainly never seen discussions of the implications of things like open source on the way we think about things like the wider world of intellectual and property rights.
To state the bleeding obvious, technological change almost always induces social and cultural change. I'm interested in the processes surrounding social and cultural change, and for me, Slashdot is a finger on one of the more interesting and potentially most influential processes of change going on at the moment.
Just my pretentious
Another problem is all the advertizing on US cable, thy often have to re-edit to get the length right. They have a Discovery Channel on cable in the UK now, but the programs are differnet becuase the UK version has significantly less commercial time than the US, so an hour long show has alot more content than in the US.
US shows like Bay Watch that are shown outside the US often shoot extra scenes known as "Euro minutes" to add into the exported version of the show so that it will run for a full hour outside the US
Consider the demographics. "We" tend to have a significantly higher proportion of the rare personality types. Mine (INTJ), for example, accounts for less than 1% of the general population, but a significant proportion of the geek/slashdot community. However, those same rare personality traits that make us geeks also make us wary of the media (I have more reason to be wary than most -- I work for them, and know how ruthless they are). The sort of people that will go forward for this are going to be the few extroverts among us, and they certainly aren't going to be representative.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
The attitude of doing everything on the cheap is one more endemic to the independent TV production companies than to the BBC itself. Don't think TV companies skimp on research because it is expensive, research is cheap, studio time, production crews, talent, and the rest is expensive. Research is often not done properly solely due to pressure of time, which is more of an issue with the structure of the commissioning process. You're view of TV production as some Dibert-esque corporate approach is almost laughable. Independent TV companies will look to save money on everything whatever the subject matter, and are going to be more concerned on being able to sell an idea, than any short cuts they might well make.
The BBC have made a few good TV programmes on the Internet, such as Tales from the Net, and the magazince show The Net, but these have been made by the BBC Education division. These programmes don't get peak time slots, and even if they did, they would get lousy ratings. That is not the point. They were intelligent TV shows, which appealed to a niche audience. The fact that they got made at all, was purely down to "the unique way the BBC is funded", in other words, if the BBC were trying operate as a purely commercial venture, much of their best programmes would be ditched for stuff with higher ratings, and lower production values. I don't blame the BBC for not producing populist programmes that will trounce ITV's peak time offerings in the ratings, that is not what they are there for. The BBC should be concentrating on quality, and breadth of subject matter. I only hope they haven't made an unwise choice in the selection of this particular company to produce one of their new programmes, since their main oeuvre seems to be cheap TV.
Remember, this is outsourced. It's a WorldOfWonder programme. So, what other magnificent programmes have this company been responsible for?
I've sent them an exploratory mail about Monochrome to see if they're genuinely interested in real internet communities, or if they just want to cover "well-known" websites and pretend, once again, that Web == Internet.
--
Jamm!n
Jamm!n
a perl CGI script using DNA spoofing to masquerade as a unix sysadmin
I can see it now:
David Attenborugh in a hushed voice in Slashdot HQ:
"It is here that the slashdot newssite is created. These busy creatures spend all day looking over code, and reading tons of electronic mail and surfing the web trying to find the next newsworthy item."
(Creeps over to an open fridge)
"As we can see, the dietary habits of these animals are very simple, consisting mostly of carbohydred sugar-water and stale old pizzas...
J.
A few months ago, on a particually slow afternoon at work, I threw together a website to take the piss out of all the loosers that want to be mayor of london basically.
I still get the odd Email about it, even though it's rubbish and I can't be bothered to maintain it in any way at all. This morning I got an Email from Planet24 saying they want me to talk about it on The Big Breakfast.
Odd.
Okay, they're talking about a two minute slot most likely not a while show devoted to my community or whatever. I don't like TV or Getting Up In The Mornings enough to bother with it even if I really wanted Frank Butcher to be mayor anyway frankly.
Still, it's feeling to me right now as though Internet Shows are the new Docusoaps. Cheep cheep cheep. They'll soon be everywhere.
Just to rant a bit about TV licencing while I'm here. The licence man came around to my house yesterday wanting to know why I haven't got a TV Licence. I haven't got a TV I said. They don't broadcast anything good enough to bother with it for a start but I'm also protesting, in my small way, the unfairness of the licence itself. If you wanna tax TV go tax people who make rubbish cheep programs, maybe they'll finally make something worth watching.
The idea of "digitribes", and the 15 minutes that slashdot is going to get for a documentary, and that random quote about power corrupting bring to my mind the question of what the future holds for governments. In an age when we might not need our Representatives to go to DC for our voices to be heard, could there be a /. effect in the next election? I full well understand that most 'puterheads are notoriously apolitical, but what if???
Hey!
Don't be so despairing that you'll ever see the results of this documentary
The BBC has a big web presence and rebroadcasts a lot of its regular programmes in RealVideo. As a homesick expat I watch the news and current affairs all the time from this page
No reason why the documentary shouldn't air online also, particularly with a bit of peer group pressure, no?
I expect to see a huge rise of friends in the Slashdot community when Rob adds Slashdot-chat and Slashdot-Instant-Messaging. :)
I'm considering whether or not I'm going to respond to the survey. On the one hand, I'm not the typical
(Yeah, that made sense.) What I'm saying is that I don't want someone to see me as a typical reader/poster/member of
And unlike what most people have said thus far, I have made friends here. I have an invite to come over for some post-Y2K homebrew from a
OK. I need to do work and find caffeine. I'll quit babbling now.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
1) The BBC is having trouble appealing to its audiences. IT its currently being trounced by ITV ( and even Channel 5 ) in the weekly ratings tracker.
2) The BBC is nervous about the digital market and wants its pound of flesh from those that subscribe to digital on top of the pound of flesh they get from you if you just happen to own a TV. So they are spending less on programmes and production.
3) The quality of the BBC programs has gone down HARD over the last year - Im sorry but its a fact and Im a consumer so I have a right to this opinion. I spend my TV time watching South Park and others on Channel 4 these days because the mainstream channels are dross.
4) BBC outsourced most of its programme making a few years back in a Dilbert-esque move. This has made the production companies absolute fortunes and not visibly benefitted BBC at all.
5) The terrestrial programmes are being criticised for not being relevant, interesting or up to date in content. Mind you so are much of the cable or
sattelite channels.
This all adds up to the fact that the Beeb wants
to screen a popularist programme on the internet
probably with the Luddite Tabloid bias. They also
dont want to have to pay for the research. I can
imagine a bunch of researchers sitting in a room saying
Manager sits nervously at the end of the table and sayes - how much is this all going to cost? Person who made the suggestion laughs manically and sayes but thats the good bit! It costs less than a cheap gameshow because the internets free and we can get the online people to do the research for us!
Manager breaths sigh of relief...
Ill give good odds that this is true.
I don't know the sociologist definitions of groups and collectives but I think one of the central aspects is that they spend time together and have common interests and goals.
For Slashdot it holds, that this is a place where we exchange information and build opinions together in our discussions. This is enough to form a larger group like that what we describe as Slashdot community, but except for the small group of Slashdot operators, this is not enough to form smaller groups and circle of friends centered around the Slashdot theme.
However Slashdot serves very well as a place where groups are formed and spawned from.
Take the CD Index project for example. It was formed spontaneously after a news on Slashdot was posted that cddb went commercial in a questionable way. A discussion followed, someone offered resources (among them the obligatory mailing list devoted to that goal) and the project started off. With one of that folks I maintain something close to a classical pen pal friendship, mostly centered around our common goal of building up a free CD database, but with exchanges of personal stuff as well.
Slashdot might not only be suited well to spawn technical projects, but considering that we shape opinion here (this is the thing we build together), I would be not surprised to see having politcal groups having their initial point of gathering here (shouting out the geek party or declaration of the rights of cyber citizens or some cybernation).
Sounds like someone's been talking to the Marketing department again.
/. but I think they are missing the point (or maybe I am).
/.
/.
/.?
/.!! It's a website that lets me discuss stuff I'm interested in. I visit it during the day when things are slow at work.
It's cool that the BBC is doing a show about
Just look at what they're asking for:
A brief biography and description of yourself.
Ok, I can't complain too much about that. They want to know who reads
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
Do they realize it's a website about geek stuff? I found it just like I found 90% of the other websites I visit regularly: on another website.
Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
My time in Slashdot? I really get the feeling that who ever is producing this hasn't actually spent any time reading
An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
Has anyone actually formed any friendships on
How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
I don't have a life on
For no particular reason other than so other /. people can see who hangs out here, here's my answers to their questions:
A brief biography and description of yourself:
I'm probably pretty typical on this one - freshman in college double majoring in CS and EE. I go to the Colorado School of Mines and play a lot of ultimate. I am also a wrestler and a pole vaulter.
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
Hmmmmmm... Kindof a chain of events. I've been programming computers since 4th grade, but it was in the last two years that I found my way here. I decided to get my own computer so I started searching for sites on how to pick out the hardware. I found a good one that went step by step and proved to be a good resource. At the very end, it said "After all that, you're not going to ruin it with windows, ARE YOU?????" and threw in a plug for linux and BeOS, both of which I hadn't heard of. I went to Linux sites and downloaded and installed it from floppy disk images, and of course once I had it installed I started keeping up with linux news - on Linux Mall's front page. They kept linking to Slashdot stories though, so I eventually saw where the action was.
I also approached this corner of the net from another direction. Just out of curiosity one day I did a web search on "how to be a hacker". It took me straight to ESR's essay, entitled "How to be a Hacker." And that run-in with the oss people also took me here.
It was a while before I got an account here though. For months, I just read and didn't even post anything. Then I posted for a while as an AC, and finally decided to get an account. I don't like racking up passwords on the web, so the only ones I have for actual web sites are slashdot.org and netaddress.com
Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
Anecdotes? Yeah. I can think of three. One is the Columbine story - the first one right after it happened. I live in Littleton, CO and last year I graduated from a school that was a Columbine rival (in soccer anyway). I was surprised at first to even see it on Slashdot (sometimes when you're really close to something like that, you don't realize how big a deal it really is in the rest of the world) but the comments here gave me a very good perspective on it. I remember that a lot of misinformation was spreading around here so I stuck around counteracting a lot of it. My school is an awful lot like Columbine and yet I was almost completely unaware of the rift between cliques. I was on the wrestling and track teams, and also a bunch of AP classes and computer and chess groups, so I had friends from all groups who probably wouldn't like each other. The whole thing was a big eye-opener.
Another anecdote is the recent evolution story here, where pretty much everyone had to put in their 2 cents. I was no exception, and I wrote a piece filled to overflowing with satire and sarcasm, but not the real grating obvious kind. Basically it took the viewpoint of an ignorant bigot who saw no need for science, or for that matter thinking, in this world. I was trying to provoke thought and make people laugh, and I think I did, but what I should have counted on was that some people just didn't see the sarcasm. Four or five people actually. It just went right by them, and they posted long rebuttals to my comment (which I think made it to level 4 or something). I spent an hour or so rereading them and laughing. I particularly liked another guy's response to one of said posts, which was to simply copy and paste the definition of 'sarcasm' out of a dictionary.
Finally, last year I got out of a social studies class with slashdot. It's true! See, I needed extra social studies credits which didn't fit well in my schedule so I asked about an independant study. They said pick a topic so I wrote "Rights in Cyberspace" (the new section would have been very helpful). So then I spent alot of time reading and posting here, and I used this place as a springboard for my research on my independant study topic, finding other good sources from links people posted here. I covered "decency" laws, intellectual property, and cryptography restrictions, and that was my study. I wrote 3 essays over the semester and finished it off with a big presentation for the principal and some Littleton Public Schools higher-ups about Cryptography. It included a powerpoint presentation explaining public keys, authentication, and hash functions complete with neat little animated diagrams. They loved it, and I got an A+ for the semester!
An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
Absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. I haven't made any friends here. How are you supposed to make friends on slashdot for chrissakes? I have friends that I can TALK TO and VISIT and DO STUFF WITH. I don't come HERE for friends. Jeez...
How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
I don't think of it as my "life on slashdot". Sure, it's a community, but not a life. I come here because I like the variety and the sometimes intelligent discussions. Mostly I think it's the site design. I mean, this is what you call a well designed web site. It is astheticaly pleasing, responsive, and lets you follow discussions in an organized, easily readable manner. And due to the excellent moderation system, the signal to noise ratio is quite high compared to most places on the net.
Oh, and the slashboxes. Can't forget the slashboxes. A few months ago I didn't think I would ever want to use a portal, but here I am using /. as my portal. Most of the sites I frequent have slashboxes here, and I can see right away if they've been updated or not. This is what the big name companies wish they could do, but here it is done right. This just loads as my home page and it's all right there at my fingertips.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I think these questions show a great misconception on what
I am reading
The remarkable thing about
/. has gone through a transition from a students home project with a few dozen, later hundreds of participiant to something with a worldwide impact, playing somewhere in the same league as the big portals. Rob and gang have not only managed to keep it alive through this growth, which is an astonishing fact in itself, but they also managed to preserve much of its spirit. Of course it can not be just the same it was in the early days (I have a user id of 824, but I was with
So I am still reading
A quick conversation with a BBC mate reveals that what has been sent is the "house template" letter to start research for a documentary on X, where X is anything from a condemned tower block to the Bavarian Illuminati. A bit boilerplate, but hey, it is not given to everyone to have a clue.
My answers would be:
A brief biography and description of yourself.
I was born amind a thunderstorm in a Huddersfield tenament, the child of a milkmaid of easy virtue, and an indeterminate number of lost Persian sailors. As a child, I was prodigiously curious about words, and ate my way through five volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary until stopped by a curious fear of the letter K. My knowledge of computers comes from the workhouse, where a kindly beadle would strike me with a copy of Knuth (Vol.1) to still my piteous cries (a cruel act indeed, given my phobia). I am fat.
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
I was interested in dots ever since university, where I studied punctuation under the great Professor Ewan Cribb. My interest in slashes developed later, while I was playing with Billy Boston's swing band.
Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
I remember a terrible tussle I once fought with a ruffian.
An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
To me, it means air, water, freedom and modesty. I have only one friend, a Mr. A Coward, who constantly impresses me with the volume of his invective and erudition. One day, I will beat him to the coveted First Post!
How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
As different as chalk from carbonate. From my eerie eyrie next to Lake Erie, I spend my days chasing chicken-hawls and remonstrating with them. On Slashdot, I merely lambast.
God, I'm bored. The bit at the top about the BBC having a form letter is true though.
jsm