Assorted Important (and Not So) Slashdot Notes

Once again I have some award things that I feal obligated to mention. If you're not interested, skip down, click the link below to read some mussings on Slashdot CDs and a Slashdot Magazine. I really want feedback on this stuff. The main one is Cool Site of the Year which has a Guitar that I want as First Prize, so go vote. You're allowed to vote every day. Nathan Machula wrote in to tell us that we're once again in ZDNet's Top 100 websites. You'll enjoy the new review of the site. Ngeran wrote in to tell us that Slashdot was on NetCenter's What's New page. We're almost a year and a half old, but they gave us a '9' for content. DPI is doing some award thing for the end of the year. Apparently you can vote for Slashdot, I don't think I win a guitar from this one *grin*. Please click the link below and read the rest of this story. It is quite important to the future of Slashdot sorta stuff

Allright, the more important stuff. First off,

Slashdot CD-ROMs?

I don't really know what good it would be, but people constantly email and suggest it. I figure we could put the html from 1998 on it and sell it really cheap, or we hire someone to write a nice little frontend search engine thingee and sell it for a bit more. Is there demand for this? Would you buy it? What is it worth? I don't think I would want it just because it's all online already- but then again, I already have access to that stuff. The major issue is that the older comments are no longer in a database (they are flushed after 30 days when the page is written out for the last time) but a competant perl hacker could easily strip that data back out.

A Slashdot Book?

People suggest this all the time too- taking the best stories of 1998 and shoving them in a nice hefty book. With a big collection of the best comments for folks to read. We're probably way to late to actually do this for the year end, althought this strikes me as more interesting than the CD. Is it a good idea? Should we consider it for 1999? Regardless, this isn't as cool as...

A Slashdot Magazine?

This has been suggested time and time again by folks. Essentially, a monthly publication wich selects a dozen or so of the best stories and prints them each with a few dozen comments. Then a section perhaps a few dozen stories worth reprinting. Perhaps an original article or something each month to make it actually have something that you can't get online. I don't really care, I'd rather keep everything online personally. Frankly I don't really even like paper all that much. But maybe it would just be cool to read in the bathroom, unless you have 10-base-T in your bathroom already (I'm so tempted but I have so far resisted despite the fact that there is a hub 10 ft away). Anyway, is this worth whatever the $20 it is to subscribe to a magazine these days? I'd have to hire folks to put it together and I'd have to find someone who actually knows how to publish something like this. The question is, is there a demand for it?

Other Random Things

Is it worth a Real Audio feed of Slashdot? I mean, eventually we'll have actual bandwidth around here and the machine won't be lagged. Would it be cool to have an audible Slashdot report for stories each day? We could conceivably do Video- I can sit behind a desk and not wear pants. We've also shot around a Slashdot Radio Show where we get a couple of geeks (maybe me and a few Slashdot authors plus random guests) a few times a week, and talk about a few of the more interesting stories off Slashdot for the day. We could take callers or something, I don't know. It might be fun.

Conclusion

Anyway, all of this is just random mussings. My first mission is to get Slash 0.3 done, get the server stable, find a few more solid, reliable, trustworthy moderators, and hopefully enjoy the holidays for a bit. But any feedback on this stuff is appreciated. Frankly I don't care if we do any of these things or not, but enough people are suggesting these things that I'm curious if its actually worth doing. If it is, it means I have to decide exactly what I want to do so that I can convince rich investors that this won't be like flushing their money directly down the toilet. Anyway, if you have ideas post them here or email me (note that there is no way I'll be able to respond to everyone, but I'll try)