Word: slashdot
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Where are they now? Rob Malda, founder of the news website Slashdot (profiled in September), has fostered hot Internet newcomers by giving away valuable code for free. David Neeleman's jetBlue airline (January) just celebrated its first birthday, took delivery of its 11th new Airbus 320 and prompted U.S. regulators to coin the term jetBlue effect, which occurs when the upstart enters a market and fares plunge. And the edgy Catalan chef Ferran Adria (November) got his own cooking show on Spanish TV. Of course, some of our rebels have had problems. Joseph Park, founder of the defiantly free...
Where are they now? Rob Malda, founder of the news website Slashdot (profiled in September), has fostered hot newcomers like the pop-culture site Plastic.com by giving away valuable code for free. David Neeleman's jetBlue airline (January) celebrated its first birthday last month, took delivery of its 11th new Airbus 320 and prompted the Transportation Department to coin the term "jetBlue effect," which occurs when the upstart enters a market and fares dramatically drop. Richmond McCoy, whose real estate company UrbanAmerica (October) invests in impoverished areas, landed a $75 million credit line from Citigroup. And the edgy Catalan chef...
Malda has taken the idea of what news was, hacked it open and rebuilt it for the Internet age. Slashdot's secret weapon is the collaborative power of the Web. Malda and the other editors don't write the site's stories. Instead it is Slashdot's readers who send in the news. In effect, Malda has an army of reporters working for him, and as a result, Slashdot often scoops the mainstream media. Case in point: when Netscape decided to give away the source code of its browser, one of the biggest tech stories of 1998, Slashdot was first...
Malda posts stories that interest him on Slashdot's front page. Below each is a bulletin board-style forum where readers can jump in with their own thoughts. It's like the McLaughlin Group meets the AV club, 24 hours a day. "We're just like, here you go, talk, go crazy, and people do," says Malda. "In the best cases, you have people who will go to the source, add to it, extend it, throw in their own two bits." Those two bits add up: on average, the news stories on Slashdot get as many as 5,000 comments...
Right now Slashdot is still mainly for the digerati. The fare is a little more technical than your average nonhacker can handle. But the possibilities of Slashdot's collaborative-news model go way beyond the nerd world. One day the Internet may offer Slashdot-style sites for every niche kind of news. Want to try it? Malda gives away the software that runs Slashdot. Goodbye, Peter Jennings. Hail, Commander Taco...