Slashdot has launched Firehose, a collaborative system designed to allow users to assist Slashdot editors in the story selection process.
From Slashdot:
The hose contains submissions, RSS Feeds, journals and Slashdot stories, each color-coded along the color spectrum to indicate popularity. Red is hot, violet is not.
This seems pretty similar to the way Digg lets you digg or bury a story, except with Firehose you get a nice interface to select which stories you want to see by using the Firehose’s color filter.
Pete Cashmore writes:
Most likely, this will be seen simply as a Digg/Reddit clone. What Slashdot needs to understand is that the power of social news sites comes directly from how much traffic they drive: if a site drives traffic, bloggers will inevitably add favicons so readers remember to bookmark articles.
I don’t frequent Slashdot anymore, but when I used to a few years ago, the stories on Slashdot were on a much higher tech/geek level than Digg’s tech section ever was. Sure, Digg has a Technology and Science section, but a lot of these stories seem to have more entertainment value than anything else.
To illustrate, when I just opened the science section on Digg I get the following three stories:
- Cool lenses (no idea what that’s about from the story title, turns out to be about colored contacts)
- Marijuana Does Not Cause Psychosis, Lung Damage, or Skin Cancer
- 5 Summer Sex Positions That Could Get You Hospitalized. Or Arrested
Slashdot‘s science section features:
- Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way
- New Theory Explains Periodic Mass Extinctions
- Building Artificial Bone
Not quite to same to me…
