The first time I heard about Slashdot, it was a wonderful place. The ‘news for nerds’ was high-impact and usually well before any other sites. I spent most of the summer of 2003 moderating comments, I even have a few 5′s.
No more.
As of today, slashdot is off my list of rss feeds. The editor-based blog is not keeping up with headlines and worse the quality of the summaries is now so low that it seems to be wrong on basic facts. This story on MySQL was the last straw. It’s a typical example of what slashdot has become: either the story is late, or it’s all over the place with a misleading headline. I don’t mind bad headlines in reddit or digg, but the editors in /. used to mean something.
The sad thing is that there’s no real substitute since the linksites like reddit and digg have barely anything to do with tech and are pretty shoddy in their content anyway. It’s going to come down to assembling rss feeds on netvibes, and reading twitter. You can look at the stuff I read on netvibes through my Tech Universe.
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This entry was written by , posted on 17/04/2008 at 11:42, filed under Uncategorized and tagged netvibes, news, rss, slashdot, tech, technology, twitter, web. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
The hook that got me into really using Twitter was reading celebrity twitters, specifically Robert Scoble. It’s a new level of knowledge to be able to get constant updates from thought-leaders with an understanding that there is an informality associated with tweets that does not arise in more fully-thought-out blog posts.
I have since moved to a rather uncomfortable write-on-one, read-on-another model. The real power of a social app is in the graph – the members and their links. However, I am using twitter feeds to shoehorn the better posting features of Pownce into the graph of twitter.
Pownce has better features, though it is still not complete. I really think it needs some sort of markup that will permit inline linking, or at least bold,italics, and so on. The original 140-character text-message style of twitter was a great way to get people into the nanoblog mentality, and I get it now : I want slightly more room so I can post links and thinks in a way that makes use of the positional context of the text I am producing (you know, that thing Tim Berners-Lee mentioned: HyperText?).
Pownce’s closed nature is starting to hurt for me, and the flood away from Jaiku (as demonstrated by Leo Laporte) shows that you need an open graph to let things really work well.
Oh, and if the Pownce people are listening, can we get public threading as well? Following conversations like that is what makes twitter rock.
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This entry was written by , posted on 15/11/2007 at 12:51, filed under Uncategorized and tagged jaiku, Leolaporte, nanoblogging, pownce, Scoble, twitter, web2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.