Collaborative Journalism: Slashdot and Kuro5hin

The cost of printing, complexity of distribution and necessity for geographically dispersed coverage have historically reserved the production of news and commentary to media firms. The choice of what stories to publish lay with editorial departments whilst journalists were employed to collect facts and opinions, carry out fact verification (more recently using expensive specialised databases) and insert what analysis was deemed necessary.

The ease of publishing on the web creates the need for means to establish credibility. Publishers with existing offline reputations leverage their brands but new players have to build trust from scratch. In 2000, a weblogger named Kealey Nicole became well known in the blogging world for the diary she maintained charting her leukemia illness and ultimate death. Doubts as to the authenticity of the author grew and investigation by other webloggers discovered that the story was untrue. Readers who had followed her battle with a terminal illness felt tricked and upset, but this incident demonstrated the obstacles to credibility of personal weblogs. The unearthing of the truth however also underlined the ability for a diffuse mass to debunk fictions and identify the facts.

Collaborative weblogs on the other hand have all formed their own reputations and the software which they have used to organise the site is in most cases the means by which this is achieved. The advent of ubiquitous networks and the arrival of the commodity workstation in millions of homes and workplaces has generated a new form of journalism that is collectively produced using discursive software to harness the knowledge, fact-checking capacity and analytical skills of the user base as a whole. The most obvious offline analogy is talk-radio, if one can imagine it functioning with multiple incoming telephone lines and the ability of both audience and particpants to judge one another’s controbutions. This chapter examines two noteworthy examples user-generated content sites that demonstrate its advantages over traditional journalism in three distinct ways: relevance, accreditation and editorial review.

Slashdot: Accreditation & Relevance Description Slashdot was founded in September 1997 by Rob Malda and Jeff Bates as a news and discussion site orientated towards the technology community. Submissions are solicited from users and selected on the basis of topicality and the personal taste of the site administrators. Accepted stories normally consist of a brief description or commentary supplied by the submitter with one or several links that are believed to be worthy of attention. The piece is then posted either to the front page or one of the many sections that define more specific communities of interest within the slashdot universe. Each story is also allocated a topic categorisation, of which there are currently nearly a hundred ranging from ‘The Almighty Buck’ to ‘Movies’ to ‘Linux Businness’. Users follow up the initial submission with comments that often number in the hundreds consisting of information, elaboration, contradiction, tangential rambling or disruption. In order to impose some order on this load, the site employs a piece of free software called ‘Slashcode’, whose principal architect is Brian Aker.

Utterance - Initial Submission Filtering: Users submit stories using an online form, and about five hundred stories are submitted every day. Slashdot has several “authors” that filter the initial content and post the story if they choose to do so. There are about twenty authors that have posted at least one story, but there are five people that account for the bulk of the filtering. Refusal to publish may derive from technical errors in the assembly of the story (broken links etc.), failure to arouse the subjective interest of the slash team (1), lack of timeliness or because enough stories have already been published on that day.

Relevance: The site is divided into approximately 50 topics ranging from games to GNU is Not Unix. There are also 10 sections, the most popular being the “article” section. Other sections cover a certain area like legal issues (Your Rights Online) or are tailored to a specific purpose like reviewing books (Book Review). The submission form for submitting stories has dropdown selections for the topic and the section. The authors that receive the story have the discretion of moving the story to another location, posting it in multiple places or not posting it at all.

Accreditation: The initial submissions are not heavily scrutinized for accuracy. According to the FAQ, “[i]f something seems outrageous, we might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this as the responsibility of the submitter and the audience.” [1] As a result, those who comment on the story perform the accreditation of the initial story ex post. The most popular stories, those that generate the most comments and those that are most viewed, are listed in the “hall of fame.”

Utterance – Comments Moderation: Slashdot has a very sophisticated method of allowing the users to be moderators of the comments. Initially Slashdot had a limited number of moderators but as the number of comments grew it was necessary to implement an automated system to select moderators from the pool of users. Moderators are selected according to several criteria. First, they must have logged in - there is no moderation power granted to anonymous surfers. Only regular participants are selected (average users who use the site on a regular but not compulsive basis). They must have been using the site for a while (this defeats those who register only to moderate), and must be willing and in possession of positive “karma” (to keep out trolls and disruptive elements). Karma is a value assigned to a user based upon the quality of their contributions (defined by the ratings of their comments). If a user meets these criteria, the program assigns the user moderator status and they user receive five “influence points” to review comments. The moderator rates a comment of his choice using a drop down list with words such as “flamebait” and “informative”, etc. A positive word will increase the rating of the comment one point, and a negative word will decrease the rating a point. Each time a moderator rates a comment it costs the moderator one influence point, so the moderator can only rate five comments for each moderating period. The period lasts for three days and if the user does not use the influence points, they expire. The moderation setup is intentionally designed to give many users a small amount of power – thus decreasing the effect of rogue users “with an axe to grind.”

Filtering The site implements some automated “troll filters” which prevent users from sabotaging the system. The troll filters prevent users from posting more than once every 60 seconds, prevents identical posts and will ban a user for 24 hours if the user has been moderated down several times within a short time frame. Slashdot provides the user with a “threshold” filter allowing the user to block lower quality comments. The threshold filter is an accreditation filter because it is based on the external standard of the community rating from the moderation described previously. The scheme uses the numerical rating of the comment (ranging from –1 to 5). Comments start out at 0 for anonymous posters, 1 for registered users and 2 for registered users with good “karma”. If a user sets their browsing filter at 1, the user will not see any comments from anonymous posters unless those comments’ have been ‘modded’ up. A user can set their filter anywhere from –1 (viewing all of the comments), to 5 (where only the posts that have been upgraded by several moderators will show up).

Relevance: Relevance is also tied into the slashdot scheme because off topic posts should receive an “off topic” rating by the moderators and sink below the threshold level (assuming the user has the threshold set above the minimum). However, the moderation system is limited to choices that sometimes are not mutually exclusive. For instance, a moderator may have to choose between “funny” (+1) and “off topic” (-1) when a post is both funny and off topic. As a result, an irrelevant post can increase in ranking and rise above the threshold level because it is funny or informative.

Accreditation/Fact Appraisal: Every day the site receives 300,000 individual viewers and these users respond immediately to factual inaccuracies and provide corrections where necessary. A recent incident illustrates the power of this human network. As part of a ‘Switch-to Microsoft’ campaign, a testimonial by a so-called convert from Macintosh to Windows XP was published in conjunction with a photo. The marketing-style phraseology of the document aroused suspicions and research was instigated into the identity of the writer and the accompanying portrait. Shortly after (thirteen minutes later to be precise!), it was discovered that the photo was actually a stock photo from a provider named Getty Images, and the author of the testimonial was in fact a public relations worker payed to pen the testimonial. Further investigation disinterred many other stock photos from MS’s site and in some cases non-testimonial photos actually contained images of Apple computers. The incident was subsequently reported in the Associated Press and proved to be extremely embarassing for Microsft who as a result removed a number of pages from their webserver (5).

Elsewhere, this form of mass feedback may serve as an important counterweight to the alteration of journalistic convention confronted by the immediacy of network communications. News reporters are under pressure to produce their stories faster, leaving less time for fact-checking and consequently make more errors according to some scholarly studies (6).

Comments are accredited by ratings they receive through moderation. If a user sets a high threshold level, they will only see posts that are considered high quality by the moderators. Users receive accreditation through their karma. If their posts consistently receive high ratings, their karma will increase. At a certain karma level, their comments will start off with a rating of 2 thereby giving them a louder voice in the sense that users with a threshold of 2 will now see their posts immediately. Likewise a user with bad karma from consistently poorly rated comments can lose accreditation by having their posts initially start off at 0 or even –1. At –1 level, the posts will probably not get moderated, effectively removing the opportunity for the “bad” poster to regain any karma. The “hall of fame” lists the top 10 comments based on the rating they receive. It does not appear to be very effective because every comment has a rating of 5 making it likely that some (or many) comments with ratings of 5 are excluded. Also according to an employee of Slashdot, there is no real scheme for choosing the top 10 comments from the pool of all those rated at 5, they are chosen at random.

Early October 1999 the U.S.-based magazine Jane's Intelligence Review decided to submit an article to pre-publication peer review by the Slashdot community for evaluation. The article was criticized by Slashdot's visitors after which the editor withdrew the original piece and replaced it with one incorporating the critics' comments and corrections (see Leonard, 1999). This was a pure form of open source journalism: the use of so-called 'open' sources on the Internet to check facts. The term 'open-source' stems from the procedure to make software source codes openly available so that experts and regular users will find and correct glitches and modify the original code to their own benefit (O'Reilly, 1998). Open source journalism applies this principle to news stories - making them available for scrutiny and corrections before final publication (Moon, 1999). As Moon summarizes: "Advocates of open-source journalism proclaim it as the new journalism, perfecting all that is wrong with traditional journalism. Others strongly oppose use of open sources, claiming the tactic will hinder the practice of traditional journalism and allow experts to wrest editorial control from journalists and the outlets for which they write"

Moderators / Meta-moderation (M2) Filtering: Average users are selected to moderate according to the selection criteria mentioned in the previous section. The moderator selection scheme is specifically designed to minimize the effects of people with an agenda to mess up the system, or target a particular thread or poster. There is also an accreditation filter based on the meta-moderation accreditation scheme detailed in the next section. Any moderator whose ratings are consistently rated unfair will eventually be removed from the pool of eligible moderators due to bad karma.

Accreditation: Slashdot implements a second level of moderation (meta-moderation – M2) in order to weed out bad moderators. M2 works by making any user that has an account from the first 90% of accounts created on the system eligible to moderate the moderations. Each eligible user that opts to perform the M2 review is provided with 10 random ratings of comments and the user rates the rating as either unfair, fair, or neither. The M2 process affects the karma of the original moderator. Currently, 96% of all moderations are judged to be fair. At the beginning, that number was as low as 40% (?). In the first week that the metamoderation system was in place, that number improved by 20%. In the last year, it has hardly changed at all.

Actors Appropriation & Effort Level Original Developers: Sold Slashdot to Andover.net that became Open Source Development Network (OSDN). The creators of Slashdot were compensated for the sale of the site and were given jobs with OSDN whose principal source of revenue is from advertising. They receive 55 million page views a month and are regarded as the #1 technical news site (4), making them an attractive proposition to many advertisers.

Authors: Most authors are compensated employees of OSDN. There is at least one professional writer that regularly contributes, Jon Katz, who started contributing to Slashdot for free three years ago. He signed a paid three-year contract to contribute original content to Slashdot. Users are not compensated and retain all copyrights on their comments other than a license that allows them to be displayed on slashdot. Comments range from throwaway reactions to thoughtful and researched contributions. Moderators are not paid either, but the amount of work required is very small as only five comments are to be evaluated. Likewise, meta-moderation only requires review of ten moderations for fairness and is hardly time-consuming.

Collective Action Problems and Enforcement Devices Slashdot attracts a wide variety of troublemakers attempting to exploit the exposure they can receive by disrupting the conversation and increasing the noise-signal ratio. One technique used is to create a script to repeatedly post comments. To counter this slashcode contains a ‘Troll Filter’ which prevents multiple posts from the same IP address during short time frames. Another tool, the ‘lameness filter’, scans for poorly assembled posts using illegible characters and forms, and prevents their appendage to the story. Other attacks manipulate html vulnerabilities such as page widening scripts, and although this cannot be filtered out by the lameness filter the IP address will be logged and banned from the site.

The examples listed above concern problems related to maintaining usability of the site. Aside from this Slashdot has problems with user circumvention of its advertising boxes. As much of the site’s revenue depends on page impressions and ‘click-throughs’ to their advertisers, this activity is much more serious in that it undermines financial sustainability. This practice is common amongst a small section of the user-base and is very difficult to prevent, as its adherents typically are sufficiently skilled to counter preventative measures. Only the development of a stronger sense of community and realization that advertising supplies the finance for its sustenance can address this problem.

An estimated 50 trolls are active on the site (determined from IP addresses). There are complicated political dealings within the troll community -- they have their own sites and interactions with one another (e.g. geekizoid has a fallout with adequacy.org).

Site administrators supervise the meta-moderation process. Where users are deemed to be abusing their position they are punished with what has become known as the ‘bitchslap’; every comment they have submitted will be retroactively scored at –1, their karma will become negative and their default score of +1 or +2 taken from them. For most purposes the consequences of the sanction (performed by bots unleashed by Taco and Hemos) is to render the account functionally disabled.

Moderation Setup – many users, small amount of power

Moderator Selection – only average user can be moderator

Moderator Posting Restriction – moderator can not post in thread they moderate

M2 Moderation – check on moderation Potential for Degrading Quality of Information Troll Filter Initial Selection of Comments – if busy day and reach their limit

Other Community Aspects Registered users are also given a space to host a personal diary with the same comment and moderation features that apply to the site in general. As blogging has eveolved into a mass phenomena these diaries have moved closer to the centre of activity. Users link to their diaries from their comment templates and a slashbox is allocated on the front page to document new diary entries. In spring a new feature, ‘Zoo’ was developed allowing users to tag one another as friends or foes (determined either by acquaintance, conflict or agreeement in debate, and just about any other random reason). The system extends to more removed enemies (freaks) and admirers (fans). The result has been the emergence of multiple subcultures within the slashdot universe and lively comment and debate through the diary pages

Scalability With the rise in the number of users and the correlated increase in the number of comments discussions have progressively become unwieldy. Inevitably the moderation system puts a number of valuable users below the visibility threshold.. As the number of semi-experienced users whose every comment receives an automatic +2 swells, it becomes correspondingly more difficult for careful contributions from less prolific users to be discovered. Some users do however read articles at a –1 threshold, apparently for amusement value, so that quality contributions can be modded up (3).

One of the ways in which the site has been able to cope with the influx of users has been an increased development of special interest Sections as communities in themselves. A more manageable volume of comments combined with the sense of shared knowledge functions to maintain the coherence that often goes awry on a front page where stories often receive 800 comments.

Kuro5hin Where Slashdot provides evidence of the capacity of users to produce relevance and accreditation, Kuro5hin’s strengths lie elsewhere, namely in its production of high quality original articles and essays. Editorial input is peer produced and commentary takes a more refined literary and logical form than the discussion at Slashdot. Relevance and accreditiation functions are also performed collaboratively on k5 albeit to a lesser degree than Slashdot. The site is subtitled ‘culture and technology from the trenches’ and heterogenous in content as opposed to Slashdot’s relatively narrow tech-community focus.

History Rusty Foster who is author also of the free software ‘Scoop’ that provides the site’s functionality founded Kuro5hin in December 1999. Previously a spoke of the Open Source Development Network (like Slashdot), Kuro5hin went independent in the spring of 2001. Kuro5hin’s community has nurtured a distinctly cooperative form. They currently serve around 4.1 million page views a month

"Collaborative media" is a catch-all phrase for things like Scoop and Slash community sites, wikis, blogs, and generally all those interesting developing hybrid forms of news/discussion/community that continue to proliferate and mutate online. –Rusty

In short, I'm wary of people abusing the goodwill of communities to make money (whether for themselves or to donate elsewhere). Cf. the lilo/openprojects situation for another example.

Impact of growth on each is distinct: a benefit for slash in terms of its fact checking capacity, a problem for k5 potentially as the conversation becomes unmanageable

Structure/Financing Following seperation from OSDN, K5 forged a series of revenue mechanisms to finance the site, which are described below. Bandwidth and server space is provided in return for in-kind advertising. The software powering the site’s functionality is free software (under a GPL license) that is developed by a pool of volunteers, thus there are no development or licensing costs.The site admin has estimated the annual costs of maintaining the site at $70,000, his breakdown of that figure is as follows: $12,000: Operating expenses (accounting, corp fees, Paying Inoshiro a paltry sum for hosting our mail and DNS) $25,200: Taxes $32,800: Money rusty takes home

Revenues:Text Ads The site also offered users the opportunity to take out their own small text ads at prices such as $2.00 per page view and sought in this way to provide a means and motivation for people to contribute without either overwhelming the site in advertising or segregating the articles into public and private (pay per access). The low cost of text ads has inspired many users to buy them to share a thought, a joke, or to promote a piece of information, they rarely refer to commercial products and many people actually like them. Indeed many ‘premium’ subscribers nominate to keep their text ads box turned on even though they have purchased the right to eliminate it. The small size of the box also means that it is unobtrusive and thus does not provoke the apoplexy of anti-commercial network users.

‘Premium’ Membership At a cost of $//4/month users can become members. Subscribers receives access to eadditional features such as spellcheckers for their comment postings, the ability to turn off advertisements, notification of replies to one’s comments or stories and monitoring for new entries on your favourite diaries. Members’ posts are also identified by an icon acknowledging their support, lending extra prestige to their activity at least in the eyes of some users.

Donations As these mechainsms were inadequate to raise the necessary funds to guarantee the site’s survival, Rusty published a proposal to establish K5 as a not for profit 501(3)© called the ‘Collaborative Media Foundation’ in April 2002, and made an appeal for donations. In the following days over $35,000 dollars was raised through user contributions, and work on the establishment of the foundation is now quite advanced. Users are kept informed on developments by Rusty through his journal and of course stories on the web page itself. He has also promised to draw up the foundation’s by-laws and constitution through a process of community collaboration/consultation, and to fill some seats on the board through elections in which all financial contributors can take part.

Filtration Stories subnitted to K5 enter a voting queue. After registered users have entered their user-name and password on the front page they have access to these stories. In some cases the author will request editorial comment and assistance, otherwise registered users are simply asked to vote on whether the story shoul;d be posted or not. Comments can be added prior to publication, and a drop down menu allows spoecification as to whether the comments are of a ‘topical’ or ‘editorial’. Voters are asked to select between a +1 rating, 0 to reflect indifference or abstention, or –1 where they think the bstory should be trashed. Those who vote in favour of the story must also decide whther it should be voted to the front page or only to a specific section. On reaching a set threshold of votes, whther positive or negative, the story is automatically posted or dumped. If posted, the story gets front page publication if more than 50% of the positve voters expressed this preference.

kuro5hin will help you get chicks.

Moderation As outlined, filtration of the initial utterance on Slashdot is performed by a small and unabashedly subjective set of individuals, whereas K5’s community as a whole votes on articles pre-publication to determine whether the story shall end up in the dumpster, a section page or the front page. K5 can be described as democratic in form and this participatory character is not limited to the selection of stories featured.

Every user has the chance to moderate a comment once. In addition the evaluation method is transparent - user i.d.’s and assessments of previous moderators can be accessed by clicking on the rating at the top of the comment. Overall ratings are a mean of the collective user evaluations, that is the sum of the ratings divided by the number of moderators. This system of moderation may be more effective that slashdot’s where moderation power is assigned on a limited and ad hoc basis. Under that model it may happen that users with little interest in the moderation process get to alter the ratings and they can do so without being tempered by more attentive and reflective moderators. K5 ensures that those who care to moderate always have the ability to do so. The universal nature of voting powers assists also in negating the effect of ‘steering voting’ whereby a user employs the rating mechanism not to go give a fair judgement on the common but instead chooses a value with the intention of affecting the comment’s score, a practice which is regarded with distaste by most of the k5 core.

Slashdot, on the contrary, bestows moderation powers on a limited number of users each week, each of whom are assigned only five points to apply increase or decrese their peers’ ratings. Furthermore, the identities of those exercising moderation powers are occluded from everyone including the participant. Slashdot staff however have an unlimited number of moderation points at all times, and have been documented using the power this bestows to structure dialogue according to their own preferences.

Relevance is organised on SD by means not only of the numerical score awarded a post but also the adjectival rating connected to it as well such as :’interesting’, ‘insightful’, ‘offtopic’, ‘flamebait’, ‘informative’, ‘funny’. These indicators signal the degree to which the post remais germane to the discussion or digresses on an unrelated tangent. As in the case of numerical evaluation, this allows the user to parse what may initially be several hundred comments to filter what may otherwise be an unmanageable discussion.

Persistence Constructive participation is rewarded with ‘Mojo’, similar to SD’s karma. The average score awarded to one’s posts establishes the rating which will be allocated to the comment prior to peer evaluation. This average is not a media howver and greater weight is attached to more recent comment ratings. Once a user’s mojo exceeds a mathematically defined threshold (apparently 3.5 out of a possible 5) they become a trusted user. The only privelige this status accrues however is the ability to read comments rated below 1, and in effect trusted users become assistants in the filtering of spam etc. and oversee one another’s judgements to ensure that 0 ratings are not being imposed for reasons of personla hostility or ideological disagreement.

K5 does not provide this type of adjectival tagging and limits relevance filtration to the rmeoval of spam and duplicate posts. In most instances this is performed by the administrators, but trusted users can also rate a comment at 0. Where the collective assesment of a comment descends below zero it becomes invisible to all but trusted users, and will remain so unless some of them decide to vote it bak up to 1.

Collective Action Problems Free riding in the context of these programs has little effect. As the central resource for journalism is attention, there isn't the same pressure as on a limited resource such bandwidth or processing power.The added value brought by users is their judgement (as expressed in their moderation activity), their submissions (adding to the pool upon which the filtration will be performed) and their creativity (in the case of k5 which relies upon its participants for its primary matter).

As Slashdots revenue base hinges upon its advertising sales, no user is in truth a free rider, as at the very least she is another viewer whose page impressions are worth as much as a registered participant. Nonetheless readers who are not signed in receive only static pages, allowing savings in terms of CPU usage.

Gaming: K5’s feature of awarding moderation powers to every user, and requiring their transparent exercise, brings problems of gaming and disruptive behaviour in its wake. The simplest method to game the community is through the establishment of multiple userids, thus acquiring the ability to mod others down systematically and mod oneself up. Likewise for the determinations made in the story queue. This vulnerability is inextricably linked to the unreliability of email addresses, in that thyey are easy and free to set up, requiring only that the individual be sufficiently determined as to take the time to do it. Requiring verifiable personla information would raise the barrier to particpation and raise privacy issues (where for example would such information be stored, who would be responbsible were it to be disclosed etc.) An alternative solution would be the use of a trust-metric as exemplified by advogato.org. There users are organised on three tiers: apprentice, journeyman and master. Lower-order users become trusted as they are certified by their higher order peers. In this way, trust is deeply imbricated in reputation accumulated over time, or in some cases through real-world cooperatioon or acquaintance.

Revenge rating, unfortunately, appears to be the cost of transparency in the voting process. A significant number of users become incensed when they find themselves rated down, and exact vengeance through systematically tracking their ‘antagonist’s’ posts and voting them down without reference to the quality of the comment or story.

Trolling is usually considered a nuisance but each user-group tends to have its favourite trolls, some of who have refined a subtle and skilled method of inflaming or otherwise distracting others. Where the behaviour is unwelcome, trusted users can award them a zero rendering their posts invisible except to other TUs, who have discretion as to whether to bring them back to visiblity or to allow them to languish. In general however, K5 discourages the promiscuous application of the zero-score vaporisation, preferring to reserve that fate for any spam found on the site.

A Democratic and Deliberative Medium? This difference in corporate form and community character is reflected in the distribution of power in the two sites. K5 is democratically self-managed, whereas slash maintains a high level of centralised control over key functions, namely: - reservation of the filtration function to the site administrators - unlimited number of moderation points for the administrators allows them to affect the rating attached to a given comment, determining its level of visibility. Slashdot also has paid employees.

Revenue Structure Slashdot receives a high revenue from banner ad sales and a smaller amount from its merchandising activities. They also have a subscriber program which allows users to turn off the advertising boxes.

Motivation Conversation has been the core network activity since the advent of email and usenet. Likewise communities of interest have been a constant and appear in manifold forms from news-groups, BBS, mailing, lists, IRC channels etc. The basic desire to exchange and show off knowledge, to win the respect of one’s peers, to particpate in a niche community of people whom share your interests fuses with the pleasure of instant publishing and thus instant gratification. From this perspective collaborative media sites represent a refinement of a pre-existing culture. The innovative aspect of this is the intelligent software fashioned to the spcific needs to manage conversation fluidity and attenuate information overload. Furthermore the tools allow the user to tailor the degree of their involvement

Lastly, many weblogs do not correspond to the descriptions provided above, and shpould not be seen as journalism engines in any sense. Whilst Slashdot and K5 may function group logic machines’, personal blogs tend to be vehicles for the expression of highly subjective editorial statements. This is not to discount the value of the alternative viewpoints articulated there, but rather to underline that not all weblogs are capable of producing the same form of collective discussion, be it for lack of critical mass, software or social protocols. “When I say collaborative, what I mean is that the site, as a “product” (to use Doc’s least favorite term) is the result of the cooperative efforts of many different people. “

The traditional print press employs journalists to cover a broad ‘beat’ that they have the background to write about to varying degrees, but the purpose is broadly to match coverage with competency. In this sense we can compare the process to the assignation of tasks within a firm. As we argue elsewhere this is often not the way to optimally allocate labor. In the weblog format, writers self-select themselves for the investigation, description and critique of areas with which they are familiar, in a manner not dissimilar to that seen in free software development. A newspaper can never have the resources to employ ‘experts’ in all areas, and in any case develops a product for a mass-audience rather than a collection of special interest users. This lacuna is filled by niche monthly or quarterly publication or trade journals. Collaborative weblogs’ effectiveness derives from their capacity to present expert knowledge combined with rivalrous interpretations to a mass media audience in a timely manner. Thus in the wake of the WTC disaster K5 could draw upon its user base to publish articles relating to the history and reality of anthrax threats by doctors, and evaluations of changes in airplane security by pilots.

The willingness of readers to check the accuracy of claims – with the tools of the web such as Google and databases to assist them – and to contest interpretations occurring in a technological framework that allows an immediate feedback loop is what makes collaborative web sites powerful. The immediacy makes the writing of the story more a process than a finite task, which distinguishes it from a newspaper’s letter column, where corrections, clarifications or complaints are published several days later, if at all. As much news has a short life-span in terms of reader interest, such amendments will often be in vain, as interest has wandered of elsewhere.

Social Protocols and Socialization Effects Many online versions of traditional media organizations recognize this and provide the option for users to add comments. The process of assembling the article remains reserved to the media-organization’s employees, which is understandable as their existence is in a certain manner hinged upon their claims to be uniquely qualified to perform this function. Because of the fact that newspapers have been a one-way medium aimed at a passive audience their users have been socialized into interacting with them in a limited and bounded way, whereas mass-collaborative blogs were conceived exactly as a means to maximize participation. Weblogs remain based around sources/articles in the traditional media, which may result from the capacity of the mainstream to set the discursive agenda, or because individual sites do not have either the resources or the desire to provide the type of punctual reportage that specialist news organizations do. In fact one of the precious aspects of a site such as K5 is that it provides a discussion forum whose content does not mimic the mainstream, leaving time for elaborate and deepened reflection.

(1) Your story just might not be interesting! Slashdot elaborates on the last criteria – “[d]eciding the interest level of a story is a very subjective thing, and we have to take into account not only the intrinsic interest of the story itself, but what else is happening that day.” [1] (2) (3) Conversation with Jeff "Hemos" Bates on 15 March 2002. (4) According to @plan [get link] (5) The first story on Slashdot: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/14/1232229 The comment discovering the stock photo: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=4447391&sid=42252 The followup (including the link to the AP story quoted above): http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/15/0044255 A long list of stock photos used in Microsoft PR (some are also fake testimonials): http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=4448357&sid=42252&tid=109 (6) The Utter Failure of Weblogs as Journalism http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/11/232538/32 http://www.scottandrew.com/weblog/2001_10 (7) Advogato trust metric

Native to the web Vetting Insurrection of the gifted amateurs. Compare to talk radio with multiple parallel lines Debunking Disclosure can be slow because of the need to maintain integrity, or because the financial model is determining everything.

Put in something about RDF/RSS feeds. See this ridiculously long-winded post by me [slashdot.org] for a detailed analysis of /.'s I find it ironic that it was a critisism of the comment system (Post of Doom) as the Troll Post Investigation Controversey regarding Maldas comments on the commercial value of comments in the context of the costs of bandwdth, processing power etc. stop punishing those who post with higher subscription fees. Rewards (extra features) make people feel happier then threats ("big ads or money!").