Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Geek central: By Andrew Leonard. At a site called Slashdot, "news for nerds" draws a passionate crowd.
Jun 15, 1998 | Three months ago, Commander Taco, the mind behind a Web site called Slashdot, posted a rumor: Blizzard Entertainment might produce a Linux-based version of its soon-to-be-released game Starcraft. The rumor turned out to be false, but within hours, so many Slashdot readers had sent e-mail to Blizzard that a support manager complained it was slowing the company from actually finishing the game.
But that was nothing. Two months earlier, on Jan. 12, Commander Taco -- who goes by the name Rob Malda in real life and is Slashdot's publisher, editor in chief and lead programmer -- published an editorial calling for Netscape to join the free software movement. Eleven days later, Netscape complied.
"Wow, this guy might be a little more influential than I thought he was," Del Simmons, a programmer who regularly submits news items to Slashdot, recalls thinking.
Malda doesn't take credit for Netscape's decision to make its source code available to all and sundry. And he regrets the Blizzard incident. But there's no question that with Slashdot, Malda has created a force to be reckoned with in what, for better or worse, can only be called the "nerd community." Since its official unveiling last September, Slashdot -- "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" -- has speedily grown into one of the Web's most popular spots to find news about events that concern computer geeks.
Slashdot is raking in the page views, to be sure -- at last count, more than 100,000 a day, the kind of numbers that make advertisers start to pay attention. But numbers alone don't begin to tell the whole story. In a testament to what can happen when geeks get passionate, Slashdot has become a nexus -- a place for them not just to read the news but to be together.
Basically, Slashdot is nothing more than a constantly updated list of pointers to articles posted elsewhere on the Web, combined with a forum for bulletin-board discussion of each of those articles. Malda and other volunteers do contribute original content, but the key to the site's success is its ability to act as a clearinghouse and filter for news about core geek issues.
Malda doesn't do all the work; his readers shoulder the bulk of the load. Each day Malda receives up to 400 submissions from Slashdot readers alerting him to events, articles, budding controversies or raging rumors. Malda culls out what interests him and posts an annotated pointer.
Such collaboration, says Malda, "allows something far greater to be created than I would be capable of alone ... I have hundreds of readers scouring the Net for the coolest stuff. And since I have the coolest readers on the Net, they find it."
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