The list really addresses the issue of linking the libraries directly with Apache, but I presume it's the same issue as indirectly linking through PHP.
libmysqlclient is thread-safe if compiled with the proper flags.
Re:How's the Apache 2.0 support?
on
PHP 4.3.2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
PHP and Apache 2.0 play together nicely. However, some third-party libraries that extend PHP's core functionality do NOT play nicely in a threaded environment. Solution: Run Apache 2.0 in prefork mode.
I'm in the business, and it's more complicated than that.
First off, you're wrong that the companies that set up separate online/offline business have "entered the Web half-heartedly." On the contrary: The companies that set up separate structures (Cox, Newhouse, KnightRidder) invested far more than average to do so. Often the impetus for separation was a (1998-era) dream of cashing in on the stock market. On the whole, that model has not worked well.
Secondly, the key driver for success in this space is unified/integrated ad sales, not integrated editorial workflow. Effective deployment of Internet "upsells" in the classified advertising process and integration of Web offerings into special campaigns is the key. These do require tight coupling of Internet and print processes.
On the editorial side, tight coupling actually works against quality; a new site that is run by print editors is likely to be dull, slow, and non-interactive. The best news sites in terms of quality have their own dedicated editorial staffs that are capable of collaborating with print.
Sharing budgets is not a requirement of any of this. While it may be difficult to track expenses by product, most of us make a very serious attempt to do so, because we need accurate information in order to make sound management decisions.
Most newspaper companies do a fair job of tracking incremental expenses and incremental revenues that are Internet-related, on that score, most of the major newspaper companies were significantly profitable on the Internet last year.
"There is no way extending something you are doing in print to a website should cost 7.5 mil a year let alone have a loss of that size after figuring in advertising."
You're in over your head.
Have you ever had to rent office space in New York city? Run an editorial, sales, administrative and technical operation with several hundred employees? Do you know what a fully loaded editorial, sales or technical FTE costs these days? Do you even know what "fully loaded FTE" means?
Do know what Web sites NYTD operates? (Hint: It's more than NYT.com.)
Do you know what NYTD pays for content? From the NYT? From the Associated Press? From Reuters? This stuff is not free.
My understanding is that NYTD pays the NYT for editorial content. NYTD then has all electronic rights to that content, including resales through archival services (Lexis-Nexis, et al). So the NYTD revenue accounting covers not only Web site operations but also other revenue sources; the expense accounting covers content acquisition.
On the expense side, NYTD maintains a significant editorial staff of its own. It has its own administrative overhead (bookkeeping, legal, etc.), and its own sales and marketing team.
Further, NYTD also operates Boston.com, which is part of the New York Times family.
Good site design is driven by a clearly defined business requirements.
The design of open Web news sites, which are dependent on advertising support, is driven by a commercial requirement that the layout -- including all of the advertising -- be visually consistent across all supported browsers.
Most of us define "supported browsers" to include 4.x and newer. That is a business decision, not a technical decision, and it's driven by observation of actual usage.
Your definition of "backwards compatibility and accessibility" misses this key point: To paraphrase McLuhan, the layout is the message. CSS2 layout degrades into a 1993 Mosaic-like presentation on older browsers. When the layout drops away, the message is lost.
The site may be "accessible" by your definition, but it doesn't meet the business requirement of presentational consistency.
Don't get me wrong -- I like CSS2 a lot. I wish everybody used a standards-conforming Web browser so that we could stop writing ugly table-infested HTML. Maybe a year from now.
The Minnesota map has been up since the mid-1990s -- we built an automated version for the Star Tribune Web site when I was online editor there. MnDOT gathers the data from in-pavement capacitance detectors. Star Tribune polls the MnDOT database using a proprietary protocol and constructs the map with bit of Perl and ImageMagick. I don't know when the MnDOT system went live, but I suspect it was in the late 1980s.
Flash is probably a better tool for doing traffic maps these days. When BRToday.com, Baton Rouge, launches in the next few weeks, it will have a Flash traffic map developed by my group at Morris Digital Works for the Advocate and WBRZ-TV.
The strength of Flash is that it can plot the information client-side, so regular users only need fetch a very tiny text file that contains status info. The Flash map itself is cached. And since it's vector-based, it's smaller than you might think for the initial transfer. The Baton Rouge city government doesn't have capacitance detectors, so we screen-scrape traffic incident info from a government Web site and plot the results on the map.
This demonstrates (again) that building online community interaction is a human interaction project and not a technology or information project.
You posted every news item on your site. No one else's name appears. Nobody is talking about anything.
People don't stop to eat at a restaurant whose parking lot is empty. In order to get a conversation going, you have to have a conversation going. That sounds like Catch-22, but there are ways around it.
You have to start out by recruiting, in the real world, a core group of deputies whose mission is to seed and lead conversations. Five or six people ought to do it. They need to post actively, and positively, modeling the behavior you want your community to adopt.
You also will need to recognize that people need to "warm up" with small talk. Trivial conversation has layers of value that you may not immediately perceive. It's how social norms are established and communicated, and how person-to-person relationships are created. If people want to debate whether toilet paper goes on over-the-roll or under-the-roll, recognize that it's part of the process of establishing the process that can lead to more substantial conversations.
I've traveled to the UK at least once a year since 1995 for Internet conferences, and if I wasn't speaking I'd travel light and leave the computer at home.
There are several EasyInternet cafes in London -- one is just outside Victoria Station -- and it's a lot nicer on your body to carry an Easy login slip in your shirt pocket than lug a piece of computer junk around with you. EasyInternet operates on an auction basis -- when load goes up, the price goes up, and when it drops, you get more time per quid. You can loaf online all Sunday morning for practically nothing. I believe an account is portable between cafes, too. Just look for the large, bright orange signs.
I've never had anything stolen while traveling (knock on wood) but that's always a possibility, too.
I'm going to Zurich in January for a small private conference, and since I'm not doing a speech, the laptop isn't coming along for the ride.
In general, when traveling internationally, Americans carry way too much luggage. There's no reason to have more than one carry-on bag, period. The OneBag guide to traveling light is full of great advice on how to travel without carrying so much junk you wind up on a chiropractor's table.
Plucker ... once some minor shortcomings are fixed
on
Alternatives to AvantGo?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm an executive with a media company that owns newspapers throughout the United States, and we're seriously considering Plucker as a recommended replacement for AvantGo for our PDA-equipped readers.
However, there are two serious "gotchas" - not with Plucker itself, but with the (very new and nice) Plucker Desktop utility, which solves most of the usability issues we had with Plucker.
We need the Palm hotsync action to automatically trigger Plucker Desktop to perform the channel updating. This is probably a fairly simple bit of conduit work. (Under Windows, look into the registry, find the Plucker binary location, and exec it with the appropriate arguments).
The other item is a one-click "sign up for this channel" functionality -- basically just a metadata file on our Web server containing URL, depth and follow/nofollow directives, probably in XML. This requires some more work on the desktop app and installer.
I've corresponded with the primary author of Plucker Desktop, and they're both on his radar, but needing some smart programmers to dive in and help out.
It gets worse. The court blasts MARTA for a Website that won't work with text-to-speech converters... and then publishes its decision on the Internet in PDF format.
There are a couple of thousand news sites around the country that are operated by local newspapers. On Sept. 11, most of them reported DROPS in traffic because their regular users were, in general, off watching the whole scene unfold on television.
Meanwhile, a handful of national sites (and the Associated Press wire.ap.org site) were either swamped or nearly swamped with traffic, mostly by people in offices with no access to TV. Many of those people aren't regular users of their local newspaper sites and may not even know they exist, but they've heard of CNN.com.
There's plenty of capacity. That's not the problem. The problem is overreliance on a small number of centralized distribution points. It's a bit like the problem of overreliance on a small number of centralized viewpoints, but not quite.
I've been doing online news since early in 1994, and I now work for a company with some 30 newspapers across the country, so I know something about traffic patterns under stress. 9/11 wasn't the first major Internet news event, you know.
In the next few weeks, our company will be migrating from the use of wire.ap.org (central point of failure) and instead will be distributing wire coverage from our own servers, which performed admirably on 9/11.
The word is "opinion," and yes, you can copyright a work of opinion. Copyright applies to expression, not to content. You cannot copyright a fact or a concept, but a creative work that expresses facts or concepts may be protected by copyright.
Slashdot posters should know better than to post copyrighted works, and Slashdot itself should demonstrate more responsibility on the issue of full-text cut-and-paste posts.
Some kid who wasn't around when domain names were invented posts nonsense like "URLs aren't supposed to make sense." Then some undercaffeinated moderator votes it up. Now, who's being stupid?
Network hosts have conventionally borne the names of their organizations since the 1970s -- in fact, before the creation of TCP/IP. The reason the domain name system was created was to facilitate use of easily memorized, meaningful names rather than numeric addresses.
Read RFCs 597, 606, 608, 810, 952, and 1034 for a start.
If you really believe "you do not need a domain name to have a website," then by all means feel free to use numeric addresses. You won't need to pay a registrar one red cent, and no corporations will sue you for infringing their trademarks.
Why does my Philips clock cd/radio require 50 tiny little buttons, each the size of a wood tick, accompanied by unreadable silver-on-silver labels, arranged in swooshy patterns that have nothing to do with anything in particular? And which one do I push to turn the flipping thing OFF at 6:30 on a weekend morning when my eyes are gummed up and all I want to do is sleep for another hour? I'll tell you which one. The power cord. Yank the sucker right out of the wall. Works every time.
Why does my Mandrake Linux box revert to KDE defaults every time I reboot, regardless of the settings in GDM? Oh, I guess I should read the source code to figure it out. God forbid that the bleeping radio buttons do what they say.
Why does the UI for Gcombust look like a preflight checklist of a commercial airliner? (I'd mention Xine and the Gimp, but... fish, barrel.)
What moron decided that in the service of fashion, all television, DVD and VCR buttons should be labeled in dark charcoal lettering on a black background, no larger than 4 point type, and angled slightly toward the floor?
Why does my Scientific-Atlanta TV remote have the power switch right next to "info?" Oops. And why does it forget my channel setting when turned off?
And then there's house wiring. Why are my wall switches wired so that the switch on the left controls the light on the right, and the switch on the right controls the light on the left?
Why does the fax machine require that the paper be inserted face-down, so I can't see/dial the phone number that's written on the document?
Why do no two photocopy machines work the same way? More paper winds up spoiled in the wastebasket next to the average copier than on anyone's desk.
How many U.S. post offices have you been to where the drive-by letter boxes are on the WRONG side of the car?
Which side of the car is the fuel filler door supposed to be on? Do car designers like to go to the 7-Eleven and watch the chaos?
Why does pushing the window button forward roll the window down in one car and up in the other? Is there something wrong with standards? Gee, maybe we should randomly invert the operation of the steering wheel, or the accelerator/brake pedals.
What idjit put the car radio's "AM/FM band" button right next to the "pop the faceplate off and drop it on the floor" button?
It must be the user's fault.
Re:Well, it dependes on the paper's circulation
on
Weblogs and Local News?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your percentages are pretty far off. A well-operated local news Web site typically attracts over 20 percent of the total local market in a single month. That's total market, not the readership of the local newspaper. Most large newspapers reach less than 50 percent of their own markets in print.
It's possible that the original poster doesn't have the critical mass to establish a viable system -- he didn't say where he is, and he didn't point to an existing Web site. There are some dismal examples operated by substantial newspapers, sad to say. But that can be fixed. (It's what I do.)
The Slashdot model isn't a good one for local news, but there's much that news sites can and should learn from it.
Slashdot is not designed to support the organization of news. It's a first-in, first-out queue. It's reverse-chron. Major stories and minor stories are treated equally, all jammed together onto a long, windy homepage.
And the whole concept is built around text. Mind you, I'm not opposed to text, but a good news site also employs informational graphics, photography, audio, video and interactive graphics.
It's a poor model for building online community. Slashdot is a fire-and-forget forum. Does anybody go back and read a thread after they've posted? The software certainly doesn't provide any help. Just look at the quality of discussion here. It's primarily snappy quips, and almost never conversation. Conversation is a back-and-forth process.
Having said all that, I've seriously considered using a Slashdot-alike system for a high-volume college conference sports site. The Slash-like front end would support posting and discussion of major stories, and would be backed by a tremendously deep automated statistical system (built on our proprietary technology). I think the model works for that particular niche application. (Unfortunately, it's simpler to write a system from scratch than figure out how to get Slashcode running on an existing high-volume site.)
Where general news sites can learn the most from Slashdot is just the top-level concept: Let your users become part of the site. I've been agitating on this point for years:
The Internet is a participative medium
Community is a process, not a place or thing
Participation is driven by interest, utility and passion, not by institutions, organization, or geography
Community can and should be at the core of any Web site
A Web site creates value by contextual integration of content, community, and commerce
User-contributed content, especially discussion content, can add tremendous value to a news presentation. I'm not in the least bit dissuaded by examples of morons running amok in message boards -- that's like pointing to examples of bad poetry, and insisting that poetry is bad. A well-administered interactive community is one of the most powerful assets a Web site can ever hope to develop.
The Kyocera Smartphone can be free these days, with all of the appropriate Sprint rebates applied. I have the Samsung i300 (color, backlit) phone -- similar to the Kyocera, but with an enhanced display. These phones can send/receive through any dialup ISP using SMTP and POP. Typically you configure Eurora to fetch the first 20 lines, ignore busy mailing lists, et cetera.
Beware, though: You have to specifically order the right digital package from Sprint or you'll be greeted with hundreds of dollars of unexpected charges for use of the cell modem. On the lower-priced packages, all modem usage is charged at a premium rate and not considered to be normal phone usage.
Also note that these phones work ONLY with PCS, not with GSM.
That's Marg ... but what's this about sex?
on
The Rise of CSI
·
· Score: 1
She spells it Marg, not Marge, and her full name is Mary Margaret Helgenberger. As for a lack of sex, Marg sure spends a lot of time bending forward into the camera while wearing a low-cut blouse. Not that I'm complaining.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a list of commonly used libraries on the Apache Web site, but it's full of question marks, and postgres isn't mentioned.
a d_ safety.html#commonlibs
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.1/developer/thre
The list really addresses the issue of linking the libraries directly with Apache, but I presume it's the same issue as indirectly linking through PHP.
libmysqlclient is thread-safe if compiled with the proper flags.
PHP and Apache 2.0 play together nicely. However, some third-party libraries that extend PHP's core functionality do NOT play nicely in a threaded environment. Solution: Run Apache 2.0 in prefork mode.
I'm in the business, and it's more complicated than that.
First off, you're wrong that the companies that set up separate online/offline business have "entered the Web half-heartedly." On the contrary: The companies that set up separate structures (Cox, Newhouse, KnightRidder) invested far more than average to do so. Often the impetus for separation was a (1998-era) dream of cashing in on the stock market. On the whole, that model has not worked well.
Secondly, the key driver for success in this space is unified/integrated ad sales, not integrated editorial workflow. Effective deployment of Internet "upsells" in the classified advertising process and integration of Web offerings into special campaigns is the key. These do require tight coupling of Internet and print processes.
On the editorial side, tight coupling actually works against quality; a new site that is run by print editors is likely to be dull, slow, and non-interactive. The best news sites in terms of quality have their own dedicated editorial staffs that are capable of collaborating with print.
Sharing budgets is not a requirement of any of this. While it may be difficult to track expenses by product, most of us make a very serious attempt to do so, because we need accurate information in order to make sound management decisions.
Most newspaper companies do a fair job of tracking incremental expenses and incremental revenues that are Internet-related, on that score, most of the major newspaper companies were significantly profitable on the Internet last year.
"There is no way extending something you are doing in print to a website should cost 7.5 mil a year let alone have a loss of that size after figuring in advertising."
You're in over your head.
Have you ever had to rent office space in New York city? Run an editorial, sales, administrative and technical operation with several hundred employees? Do you know what a fully loaded editorial, sales or technical FTE costs these days? Do you even know what "fully loaded FTE" means?
Do know what Web sites NYTD operates? (Hint: It's more than NYT.com.)
Do you know what NYTD pays for content? From the NYT? From the Associated Press? From Reuters? This stuff is not free.
Careful with your assumptions about subsidies.
My understanding is that NYTD pays the NYT for editorial content. NYTD then has all electronic rights to that content, including resales through archival services (Lexis-Nexis, et al). So the NYTD revenue accounting covers not only Web site operations but also other revenue sources; the expense accounting covers content acquisition.
On the expense side, NYTD maintains a significant editorial staff of its own. It has its own administrative overhead (bookkeeping, legal, etc.), and its own sales and marketing team.
Further, NYTD also operates Boston.com, which is part of the New York Times family.
"doesn't wine work on some sort of Virtual Machine"
No.
http://www.winehq.com/?page=myths
No, no, no.
Good site design is driven by a clearly defined business requirements.
The design of open Web news sites, which are dependent on advertising support, is driven by a commercial requirement that the layout -- including all of the advertising -- be visually consistent across all supported browsers.
Most of us define "supported browsers" to include 4.x and newer. That is a business decision, not a technical decision, and it's driven by observation of actual usage.
Your definition of "backwards compatibility and accessibility" misses this key point: To paraphrase McLuhan, the layout is the message. CSS2 layout degrades into a 1993 Mosaic-like presentation on older browsers. When the layout drops away, the message is lost.
The site may be "accessible" by your definition, but it doesn't meet the business requirement of presentational consistency.
Don't get me wrong -- I like CSS2 a lot. I wish everybody used a standards-conforming Web browser so that we could stop writing ugly table-infested HTML. Maybe a year from now.
> an extra 3,263Gb of email traffic we don't need.
Not a problem.
The bottleneck is in human time/attention, not network bandwidth, of which there is extreme surplus.
The Minnesota map has been up since the mid-1990s -- we built an automated version for the Star Tribune Web site when I was online editor there. MnDOT gathers the data from in-pavement capacitance detectors. Star Tribune polls the MnDOT database using a proprietary protocol and constructs the map with bit of Perl and ImageMagick. I don't know when the MnDOT system went live, but I suspect it was in the late 1980s.
Flash is probably a better tool for doing traffic maps these days. When BRToday.com, Baton Rouge, launches in the next few weeks, it will have a Flash traffic map developed by my group at Morris Digital Works for the Advocate and WBRZ-TV.
The strength of Flash is that it can plot the information client-side, so regular users only need fetch a very tiny text file that contains status info. The Flash map itself is cached. And since it's vector-based, it's smaller than you might think for the initial transfer. The Baton Rouge city government doesn't have capacitance detectors, so we screen-scrape traffic incident info from a government Web site and plot the results on the map.
"the author, James Gleick, is more technically educated than what we've come to expect from the big press."
Maybe because after many years as a reporter, he founded Pipeline, one of the first big ISPs.
This demonstrates (again) that building online community interaction is a human interaction project and not a technology or information project.
You posted every news item on your site. No one else's name appears. Nobody is talking about anything.
People don't stop to eat at a restaurant whose parking lot is empty. In order to get a conversation going, you have to have a conversation going. That sounds like Catch-22, but there are ways around it.
You have to start out by recruiting, in the real world, a core group of deputies whose mission is to seed and lead conversations. Five or six people ought to do it. They need to post actively, and positively, modeling the behavior you want your community to adopt.
You also will need to recognize that people need to "warm up" with small talk. Trivial conversation has layers of value that you may not immediately perceive. It's how social norms are established and communicated, and how person-to-person relationships are created. If people want to debate whether toilet paper goes on over-the-roll or under-the-roll, recognize that it's part of the process of establishing the process that can lead to more substantial conversations.
I've traveled to the UK at least once a year since 1995 for Internet conferences, and if I wasn't speaking I'd travel light and leave the computer at home.
There are several EasyInternet cafes in London -- one is just outside Victoria Station -- and it's a lot nicer on your body to carry an Easy login slip in your shirt pocket than lug a piece of computer junk around with you. EasyInternet operates on an auction basis -- when load goes up, the price goes up, and when it drops, you get more time per quid. You can loaf online all Sunday morning for practically nothing. I believe an account is portable between cafes, too. Just look for the large, bright orange signs.
I've never had anything stolen while traveling (knock on wood) but that's always a possibility, too.
I'm going to Zurich in January for a small private conference, and since I'm not doing a speech, the laptop isn't coming along for the ride.
In general, when traveling internationally, Americans carry way too much luggage. There's no reason to have more than one carry-on bag, period. The OneBag guide to traveling light is full of great advice on how to travel without carrying so much junk you wind up on a chiropractor's table.
I'm an executive with a media company that owns newspapers throughout the United States, and we're seriously considering Plucker as a recommended replacement for AvantGo for our PDA-equipped readers.
However, there are two serious "gotchas" - not with Plucker itself, but with the (very new and nice) Plucker Desktop utility, which solves most of the usability issues we had with Plucker.
We need the Palm hotsync action to automatically trigger Plucker Desktop to perform the channel updating. This is probably a fairly simple bit of conduit work. (Under Windows, look into the registry, find the Plucker binary location, and exec it with the appropriate arguments).
The other item is a one-click "sign up for this channel" functionality -- basically just a metadata file on our Web server containing URL, depth and follow/nofollow directives, probably in XML. This requires some more work on the desktop app and installer.
I've corresponded with the primary author of Plucker Desktop, and they're both on his radar, but needing some smart programmers to dive in and help out.
It gets worse. The court blasts MARTA for a Website that won't work with text-to-speech converters ... and then publishes its decision on the Internet in PDF format.
There are a couple of thousand news sites around the country that are operated by local newspapers. On Sept. 11, most of them reported DROPS in traffic because their regular users were, in general, off watching the whole scene unfold on television.
Meanwhile, a handful of national sites (and the Associated Press wire.ap.org site) were either swamped or nearly swamped with traffic, mostly by people in offices with no access to TV. Many of those people aren't regular users of their local newspaper sites and may not even know they exist, but they've heard of CNN.com.
There's plenty of capacity. That's not the problem. The problem is overreliance on a small number of centralized distribution points. It's a bit like the problem of overreliance on a small number of centralized viewpoints, but not quite.
I've been doing online news since early in 1994, and I now work for a company with some 30 newspapers across the country, so I know something about traffic patterns under stress. 9/11 wasn't the first major Internet news event, you know.
In the next few weeks, our company will be migrating from the use of wire.ap.org (central point of failure) and instead will be distributing wire coverage from our own servers, which performed admirably on 9/11.
The word is "opinion," and yes, you can copyright a work of opinion. Copyright applies to expression, not to content. You cannot copyright a fact or a concept, but a creative work that expresses facts or concepts may be protected by copyright.
Slashdot posters should know better than to post copyrighted works, and Slashdot itself should demonstrate more responsibility on the issue of full-text cut-and-paste posts.
Some kid who wasn't around when domain names were invented posts nonsense like "URLs aren't supposed to make sense." Then some undercaffeinated moderator votes it up. Now, who's being stupid?
Network hosts have conventionally borne the names of their organizations since the 1970s -- in fact, before the creation of TCP/IP. The reason the domain name system was created was to facilitate use of easily memorized, meaningful names rather than numeric addresses.
Read RFCs 597, 606, 608, 810, 952, and 1034 for a start.
If you really believe "you do not need a domain name to have a website," then by all means feel free to use numeric addresses. You won't need to pay a registrar one red cent, and no corporations will sue you for infringing their trademarks.
Posting full text isn't fair use. It's a copyright violation.
Why does my Philips clock cd/radio require 50 tiny little buttons, each the size of a wood tick, accompanied by unreadable silver-on-silver labels, arranged in swooshy patterns that have nothing to do with anything in particular? And which one do I push to turn the flipping thing OFF at 6:30 on a weekend morning when my eyes are gummed up and all I want to do is sleep for another hour? I'll tell you which one. The power cord. Yank the sucker right out of the wall. Works every time.
... fish, barrel.)
Why does my Mandrake Linux box revert to KDE defaults every time I reboot, regardless of the settings in GDM? Oh, I guess I should read the source code to figure it out. God forbid that the bleeping radio buttons do what they say.
Why does the UI for Gcombust look like a preflight checklist of a commercial airliner? (I'd mention Xine and the Gimp, but
What moron decided that in the service of fashion, all television, DVD and VCR buttons should be labeled in dark charcoal lettering on a black background, no larger than 4 point type, and angled slightly toward the floor?
Why does my Scientific-Atlanta TV remote have the power switch right next to "info?" Oops. And why does it forget my channel setting when turned off?
And then there's house wiring. Why are my wall switches wired so that the switch on the left controls the light on the right, and the switch on the right controls the light on the left?
Why does the fax machine require that the paper be inserted face-down, so I can't see/dial the phone number that's written on the document?
Why do no two photocopy machines work the same way? More paper winds up spoiled in the wastebasket next to the average copier than on anyone's desk.
How many U.S. post offices have you been to where the drive-by letter boxes are on the WRONG side of the car?
Which side of the car is the fuel filler door supposed to be on? Do car designers like to go to the 7-Eleven and watch the chaos?
Why does pushing the window button forward roll the window down in one car and up in the other? Is there something wrong with standards? Gee, maybe we should randomly invert the operation of the steering wheel, or the accelerator/brake pedals.
What idjit put the car radio's "AM/FM band" button right next to the "pop the faceplate off and drop it on the floor" button?
It must be the user's fault.
Your percentages are pretty far off. A well-operated local news Web site typically attracts over 20 percent of the total local market in a single month. That's total market, not the readership of the local newspaper. Most large newspapers reach less than 50 percent of their own markets in print.
It's possible that the original poster doesn't have the critical mass to establish a viable system -- he didn't say where he is, and he didn't point to an existing Web site. There are some dismal examples operated by substantial newspapers, sad to say. But that can be fixed. (It's what I do.)
Slashdot is not designed to support the organization of news. It's a first-in, first-out queue. It's reverse-chron. Major stories and minor stories are treated equally, all jammed together onto a long, windy homepage.
And the whole concept is built around text. Mind you, I'm not opposed to text, but a good news site also employs informational graphics, photography, audio, video and interactive graphics.
It's a poor model for building online community. Slashdot is a fire-and-forget forum. Does anybody go back and read a thread after they've posted? The software certainly doesn't provide any help. Just look at the quality of discussion here. It's primarily snappy quips, and almost never conversation. Conversation is a back-and-forth process.
Having said all that, I've seriously considered using a Slashdot-alike system for a high-volume college conference sports site. The Slash-like front end would support posting and discussion of major stories, and would be backed by a tremendously deep automated statistical system (built on our proprietary technology). I think the model works for that particular niche application. (Unfortunately, it's simpler to write a system from scratch than figure out how to get Slashcode running on an existing high-volume site.)
Where general news sites can learn the most from Slashdot is just the top-level concept: Let your users become part of the site. I've been agitating on this point for years:
The Internet is a participative medium
Community is a process, not a place or thing
Participation is driven by interest, utility and passion, not by institutions, organization, or geography
Community can and should be at the core of any Web site
A Web site creates value by contextual integration of content, community, and commerce
User-contributed content, especially discussion content, can add tremendous value to a news presentation. I'm not in the least bit dissuaded by examples of morons running amok in message boards -- that's like pointing to examples of bad poetry, and insisting that poetry is bad. A well-administered interactive community is one of the most powerful assets a Web site can ever hope to develop.
Beware, though: You have to specifically order the right digital package from Sprint or you'll be greeted with hundreds of dollars of unexpected charges for use of the cell modem. On the lower-priced packages, all modem usage is charged at a premium rate and not considered to be normal phone usage.
Also note that these phones work ONLY with PCS, not with GSM.
She spells it Marg, not Marge, and her full name is Mary Margaret Helgenberger. As for a lack of sex, Marg sure spends a lot of time bending forward into the camera while wearing a low-cut blouse. Not that I'm complaining.
How many more times is this going to be posted?
The announcement says "Highly improved performance in general .... Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows."
This suggests that Unix/Linux performance is improved. Anybody have details on that? Performance metrics?