Under Slashdot's Bonnet

Everybody knows that Google runs on scadzillions of GNU/Linux boxes, but now we also know the details about Slashdot's Penguin power:

Slashdot currently has 16 web servers all of which are running Red Hat 9. Two serve static content: javascript, images, and the front page for non logged-in users. Four serve the front page to logged in users. And the remaining ten handle comment pages. All web servers are Rackable 1U servers with 2 Xeon 2.66Ghz processors, 2GB of RAM, and 2x80GB IDE hard drives. The web servers all NFS mount the NFS server, which is a Rackable 2U with 2 Xeon 2.4Ghz processors, 2GB of RAM, and 4x36GB 15K RPM SCSI drives.

Impressive what you can do with 16 boxes.

Mmm, Yes, But

Antony Mayfield points to an interesting piece in the Guardian that worries about what it calls the Mmm, Yes, But culture that blogs can spawn:

They will write: "Mmm, yes, but have you considered ..." To which we will reply: "Mmm, yes, you could be right about ..." And so a wonderfully civilised post-Blairite conversation will ensue. I wonder. There's nothing very civilised about a lot of the posting happening now; it's more like a shouting match-cum-punchup. And that's why it's often so entertaining. There is something about the Mmm-yes-but theory of the blog that is quite disquieting. Even if it became a reality, it could result only in hesitant journalism, bland criticism and writing that is predisposed to dull consensus.

As a journalist and blogger, I too have noticed this practice. Indeed, I adopt myself. But this is not out of timidity, but because I think it is the only way if blogging is to lead to anything of value in terms of online discussions.

If you want to see why the mmm-yes-but approach is necessary, take a look at the comments on Digg or Slashdot. There you will see human nature at its worst, with abusive, ad hominem, logicless attacks on the other posts leading to yet more of the same. If, on the contrary, you answer with the mmm-yes-but technique, I've noticed how it quickly chills the temperature of the debate. Not, let it be noted, the level of the debate, merely the language in which it is framed.

So to the Guardian writer and his points, I can only say: mmm, yes, but....

Open Journalism, Transparently

I wrote about Jay Rosen and his open journalism experiment a few months back. If you're still unconvinced (or just a bit in the dark) do read this Slashdot interview: it's clear that Rosen has put a huge amount of effort into his answers that are clear, illuminating and packed full of great links.

A sample:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.

A Nod's as Good as a Wink

As I mentioned, I have started playing with Google Analytics for this blog. It's early days yet, but already some fascinating results have dropped out - I'll be reporting on them once the trends become slightly more significant than those based on two days' data....

But one thing just popped up that I thought I'd pass on. Some of my traffic has come from Wink, which describes itself as a social search engine. More specifically:

Wink analyzes tags and submissions from Digg, Furl, Slashdot, Yahoo MyWeb, and other services, plus user-imported tags from del.icio.us, and favorites marked at Wink, and figure[s] out which pages are most relevant.

So basically Wink aims to filter standard Web search results through the grid of social software like Digg, del.icio.us etc. It's a clever idea, although the results at the moment are a little, shall we say, jejune. But I'm grateful for the tip that Google Analytics - and one of my readers - has given me. Duly noted.

A Question of Standards

Good to see Andy Updegrove's blog getting Slashdotted. This is good news not just for him, but also for his argument, which is that open source ideas are expanding into new domains (no surprise there to readers of this blog), and that traditional intellectual property (IP) models are being re-evaluated as a result.

Actually, this piece is rather atypical, since most of the posts are to do with standards, rather than open source or IP (though these are inevitably bound up with standards). Andy's blog is simply the best place to go for up-to-the-minute information on this area; in particular, he is following the ODF saga more closely - and hence better - than anyone. In other words, he's not just reporting on standards, but setting them, too.

Digg This, It's Groovy

Digg.com is a quintessentially Web 2.0 phenomenon: a by-the-people, for-the-people version of Slashdot (itself a keyWeb 1.0 site). So Digg's evolution is of some interest as an example of part of the Net's future inventing itself.

A case in point is the latest iteration, which adds a souped-up comment system (interestingly, this comes from the official Digg blog, which is on Blogger, rather than self-hosted). Effectively, this lets you digg the comments.

An example is this story: New Digg Comment System Released!, which is the posting by Kevin Rose (Digg's founder) about the new features. Appropriately enough, this has a massive set of comments (nearly 700 at the time of writing).

The new system's not perfect - for example, there doesn't seem to be any quick way to roll up comments which are initially hidden (because they have been moderated away), but that can easily be fixed. What's most interesting is perhaps the Digg sociology - watching which comments get stomped on vigorously, versus those that get the thumbs up.

A Question of Value

Although not quite in the same class as Open Access News in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, Slashdot does have its uses, not least as raw entertainment (it's also quite useful for a bit of blog boosting, too....). And sometimes it throws up something that is pure gold.

A case in point tonight, with a link to a story by James Boyle in today's FT. Since that story will more likely than not sink irrevocably into the limbo of subscriber-only content, I won't even bother wasting angled brackets and Href= on it. Happily, though - and this, perhaps, is the real value of Slashdot - one of the comments linked to a much fuller version of the article's underlying arguments that is freely available on Boyle's rich if horribly-designed Website (frames, in the 21st century: can you believe it?)

The item is called, intriguingly, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net?" Here's a short excerpt from the opening section:

The theme of cyberpunk is that the information age means the homologisation of all forms of information -- whether genetic, electronic, or demographic. I grew up believing that genes had to do with biology, petri dishes and cells and that computers had to do with punch cards and magnetic disks. It would be hard to imagine two more disparate fields. In contrast cyberpunk sees only one issue ~ code ~ expressed in binary digits or the C's,G's, A's and T's on a gene map.

This should give a hint of just how spot-on the whole piece is.

I won't attempt to summarise the whole thing here - partly because I've not digested it fully myself, and it seems too important to vitiate with my own ham-fisted approximations, and partly because Boyle's essay is, in any case, precisely the length it needs to be for a deep analysis of a complicated domain. You might read it now, or wait until I come up with some vaguely coherent thoughts in due course: this, I most certainly will do, since the issues it touches on are central to much of what I am writing about here.

You have been warned.