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.
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
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.
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