One of the oldest rivals to the community news site Digg is pointing to recent unrest at the site as evidence that the social news model is flawed.
Last week, frequent users of Digg protested changes in its algorithms that were designed to emphasize broader voting in determining which stories make it to Digg’s well-trafficked main page. Digg executives Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson listened to and addressed the protesters in an attempt to defuse their objections and prevent their threatened exodus from the community.
Meanwhile, to Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco, founder of the pioneering technology news site Slashdot, the chickens were coming home to roost.
Mr. Malda, 31, spoke from his home in Michigan about Slashdot’s new site, Idle, a compendium of links to non-technology-related video and news bits. The new site, which is currently in testing mode, is clearly aimed at taking some audience away from weird-news-of-the-day sites like Digg and Fark.com.
“We read or watch everything submitted to us,” Mr. Malda said of his site, which rather traditionally employs a small cadre of editors to select which stories make it to the main Slashdot page. “Historically, if it wasn’t about tech, we rejected it. But we realized we could put it somewhere and let the Slashdot community talk about it and enjoy it as well.”
But Mr. Malda could not help using the discussion about Idle to address problems at Digg, and what he sees as the flaws of the community news model.
“A lot of these community news sites are all about Ron Paul,” he said. “Ron Paul may be a valid candidate. But what that is really demonstrating is that you are seeing 1 or 2 percent of a community shaping where the whole community is going. A small dedicated group of people can manipulate these sites very easily.”
Mr. Malda said that Digg must move to deemphasize that vocal minority in the overall voting. But then it would inevitably alienate its core user base. “All these sites start with a nucleus of dedicated people. Then as the gawkers join in you see a dilution. People who were there originally feel alienated and feel that the thing they helped created is being perverted.”
“I try not to paint Digg as my arch-nemesis. The Digg method and Digg community are a wider audience than Slashdot,” he said. “But with sites like Digg, it’s the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you’re going to get.”
The deposed chief justice of Pakistan has described President Musharraf as an “extremist general” for sacking him and 60 other top judges.
Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry also criticised the president for keeping him and his family under house arrest for the last three months.
Mr Chaudhry had a reputation for taking a firm line on government misdemeanours and human rights abuses.
He was sacked when President Musharraf imposed emergency rule in November.
His dismissal came as the court was preparing to rule on the validity of President Musharraf’s re-election.
This piece,today’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine, is long and complicated, and it may not even be right–vast global geo-strategic syntheses rarely are–but it does get you thinking…and what it got me thinking about was John McCain.
You watch McCain talking about the world and it very quickly becomes apparent that he is talking about a place that existed maybe 15 or 20 years ago, a globe where the U.S. is hegemon and where the challenges are always binary and manichean. It’s us v. the Soviets…or now, us against radical Islamic extremism, a threat that he gins up into the one of the Greatest Ever, the “transcendent threat of the 21st Century.” Maybe so. Maybe Osama and the Cave-dwellers will be able to produce a 9/11, or worse, every decade or so…maybe we’ll have to continue to spend $200 billion a year to fight that threat.
Iraqi army reinforcements moved Sunday into positions near the northern city of Mosul, ready to strike al-Qaeda in Iraq targets in their last urban stronghold, a top Iraqi officer said.
Maj. Gen. Riyad Jalal, a senior officer in the Mosul region, said the additional forces were encamping in an Iraqi base near the city, and would open an offensive against al-Qaeda fighters “immediately after all the added troops arrive.”
If social and political conservatives tend to be more cautious about Pan-European institutions than those on the left, this week provided another example why. The European Court of Human Rights overturned French court rulings that prevented a single lesbian woman from adopting a child. The decision sets a precedent not just across the 27-nation European Union, but throughout the 47-member Council of Europe. Gay and lesbian groups say it opens the way for legal challenges in other European states with adoption laws similar to those of France — yet falls well short of a blanket ruling that would oblige all countries to allow adoption by homosexuals.
There’s been only one incident of a NASA crew member being impaired by drugs or alcohol close to a launch, but never on a launch day, according to a new survey of active-duty astronauts and flight surgeons.
NASA has called reports of astronauts who were drinking or hung over on launch day an “urban myth.”
The person was seen to be impaired in the time leading up to the launch because of an apparent interaction between prescription medication and alcohol.
Less than a dollar a day is a phrase we are all familiar with, but what does it really mean?
Almost half the world’s population lives on less than a dollar a day, but the statistic fails to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world’s poor.
In this series, Mike Wooldridge looks at what it’s really like to have to live on a dollar a day and how it can mean different things in different countries, and asks whether the global target of halving world poverty by 2015 can really be achieved.
It isn’t all about desperation and gloom, though: Mike meets people of incredible energy and determination, living in vibrant communities and having a diversity of experiences.
Afghanistan’s president warned Wednesday that the whole world could suffer from the “wildfire” of terrorism engulfing his region, a grim message for a meeting of political and business leaders already fretting over the threat of global recession.
Hamid Karzai addresses the opening session of the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.
Formally opening the World Economic Forum, Hamid Karzai gave a sobering rundown of recent attacks attributed to Islamic extremists — among them the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan that have killed hundreds, including many children.
With militant violence still on the rise in the two nations six years after the ouster of the Taliban, “it seems like the mutant of extremism is dangerously unleashed across the region,” Karzai said. The trend “bodes terribly badly for the whole world,” he said.
In an apparent allusion to Pakistan — whose president, Pervez Musharraf, originally supported the Taliban — Karzai called terrorism “a venomous snake that some among us tried to nurture and befriend at the expense of others, which I hope we realize now was a mistake.”
A three-judge panel in northern Afghanistan has sentenced a student journalist to death for distributing a paper he printed off the Internet that allegedly blasphemed Islam, according to international media groups.
Moulvi Shamas-ul- Rehman Moomand, head of the court which sentenced Sayad Parwez Kambaksh to death gestures during a press conference.
But media groups in the country say the journalist is in fact being punished for investigative pieces his brother wrote.
Those articles exposed human rights abuses by political and paramilitary factions in northern Afghanistan.
“When the state bows to Islam, all other people who are believers in such
other religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, or are atheists and/or
sons and daughters of people who do not believe in Islam but in other
religions, must necessarily live as second-class citizens. Anyone willing
to become a faithful Muslim can learn from the Holy Quran where it is
clearly declared that wherever one finds kafirs, or un-Islamic people, one
should destroy them, kill them, and wherever one finds a person who is
unfaithful and an unbeliever, one should immediately slice off his left
foot and right arm, and then his right foot and left arm. It is not that
the Musalmans themselves will lead a life of happiness. The bulldozer of
religion will crush women relentlessly. Women will not remain women; they
will be rendered into pieces of raw, bloody flesh.