Newswise — Launched long before blogs and news aggregators ruled the Internet, Slashdot has spent the past decade cherry-picking and linking to what the site bills as "news for nerds"--the cool and crucial science and technology stories that Rob Malda and his crew of nine think you must know: a massive cave found on Mars, artificial intelligence used to train firefighters, a "chairbot" that walks you around while you sit.
The site has run more than 78,000 articles since it launched in 1997, and it is still growing rapidly. As a result of its erudite linking, Slashdot has built one of the most feverishly loyal and influential communities of geeks online. Each day the site gets about 500,000 visitors, who together view some 2 million pages. Getting a link from the site--getting "Slashdotted"--can sometimes be too much of a good thing. A single mention can generate enough traffic to overwhelm a smaller site's servers with traffic, temporarily killing it with attention. Fortune magazine once called Slashdot "the future of media." In 2001, Time named Malda one of the top innovators of the future.
The online landscape has changed, though. The selection and linking that Slashdot pioneered have since become the stuff of the blogosphere, and now news aggregators such as Digg have been stealing Slashdot's thunder. Taking into account a combination of page views and users, research firm Alexa Internet ranks Digg's site close to 100th, whereas Slashdot falls near 600th.
Although Slashdot has been criticized for lagging on redesigns--it's had only one major overhaul since its inception--it has succeeded in harnessing and, in a sense, gaming the tyranny of the masses. Behind the scenes, Malda and his team have created and coded a unique system for keeping information and opinions flowing but under control.
Malda has plenty of work still ahead. In the wings is another big Slashdot change, a system called Firehose, which aims to meld the assessment of knowledgeable moderators with a popularity rating.
Veteran tech journalist David Kushner traveled to Dexter, Mich., population 2338, and came back with the answers to three questions: What's Malda like? What's he up to now? And can Slashdot keep up with Digg, Facebook, and all the other cool kids on the Web 2.0 block?
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