What happened to Slashdot?
For years I found cutting edge technical pointers at Slashdot (“News for nerds, stuff that matters”). Two or three times per day I’d pull up the site to see what was new and often found myself scrolling through comments, clicking on links to the main topic or ones from commenters, and generally feeling really on top of what was happening with alpha males in techdom.
Today, Slashdot (/.) is just one of many sites I skim with my RSS reader. Rarely do I see something there that I’ve not already seen somewhere else, or simply don’t care about and thus don’t read the /. post.
So why have they become less relevant? It seems to me that there are so many bloggers that are covering seemingly every development technically, that the smart people formerly posting to /. are simply doing it on a blog instead.
Makes me wonder how many other hot sites are becoming less hot now that blogging, blog conversation trackers and other sites are making new information available virtually the moment there is awareness.
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Connecting the Dots Podcast
Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.
Good call with blog conversation trackers, etc… it seems as though most “news editing” is being done by computers nowadays. Makes you wonder just how accurate “Epic 2015” will end up proving itself to be…
-J
I noticed a few years back, /. began suffering from a frequency problem – new stories took too long to surface. Thus, by the time I read it on /., I had already read it somewhere else. Sometimes the delta was days, sometimes months.
Whether this is a problem of too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen, or me finding faster moving sources, I didn’t stick around to find out.