An article on the subject of the term and associated phenomena compiled by users of English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) attributes a possible first recorded usage of the word ‘weblog’ to Jorn Barger, dated December 1997 (“Blog,” 2005), and hence subsequent to Slashdot’s creation. The word’s entry into popular usage, furthermore, comes far later. The Oxford English Dictionary, which concerns itself chiefly with print media for this and other reasons, did not publish the addition of ‘blog’ and ‘weblog’ until March 13th, 2003, at which time both were added simultaneously (“Motswana to Mussy,” 2005) and the use of “weblog” or “blog” to mean “online journal” or “diary” is not evident prior to 1998 in Usenet postings archived by Google Groups (presently located at http://groups.google.com but at that time being archived by Deja News prior to acquisition by Google). By all accounts, Slashdot is a progenitor in this field and consequently, was forced to conceive its own means for online publishing, there being no freely available software solution at the time of its creation capable of providing the services which Slashdot’s system would come to represent.

In the broadest possible sense, “Slashdot” describes the technologies responsible for providing the dynamic generation of the Slashdot.org website while it simultaneously refers to the community of users and editors who interact with and are responsible for its live version and the site content present there. In practice, more precise usage sees a clear distinction made between Slash as a software development project on one hand and Slashdot.org as a web community located at the URL http://slashdot.org on the other. And though the two are fundamentally interdependent, in that Slash would not exist without Slashdot and vice versa, there is no necessity for example that members of the Slash contributor community ever so much as visit the site Slashdot.org in order to be productive within it. And personalities crucial to one are not necessarily at all important to the other.

As a software package, in theory, Slashdot.org at any given time exists as an almost identical derivative of the current stable version of the Slash code under development at http://slashcode.com (“Is this the same code,” August 2005). In practice, however, Slashdot.org has been known to lag far behind the development cycle of Slash itself (“What kind of hardware does Slashdot run on?” June 2000) and has been criticised for failing to maintain up to date standards compliance in other more general respects (“Slashdot HTML 4.01 and CSS,” Sept 2005).

Slash is therefore used to refer to the software backend, as distinct from template information and database content, on which any and all Slash sites using the code available at http://slashcode.com operate. Consequently, Slashdot.org here refers to the site generated at that address, Slashdot to the community of readers and editors and collaborators present there along with their creative output, and Slash to the software which allows the site to operate, developed at slashcode.com and sourceforge.net and documented, for example, in O’Reilly Publishing’s Running Weblogs With Slash (ISBN 0-596-00100-2). An example of a non-Slashdot.org site running Slash is to be found at Library & Information Science News, http://www.lisnews.com/.

Slash is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) as free software and consists chiefly of a collection of Perl scripts intended for implementation on the web using the Apache webserver in conjunction with a MySQL database. Unlike many other longstanding open source projects, Slash has never been subject to a significant development fork leading to divergent distributions. The fairly fundamental association of Slash with Slashdot.org and those who maintain it would likely prevent a fork from gaining momentum as a collaborative project outside of the Slashcode.com and Slashdot.org cultural environments, though the GPL under which it is licensed makes it effectively impossible for its creators to prevent a fork from emerging if other individuals wish to pursue its creation. And as Slash is already free software under the GPL, there would be no justification, legal or ideological, for a political break with the Slash project in favour of other licensing, as essentially all commercial licenses are incompatible with the GPL, and no other license is perceived by the open source community as offering superior provisions for freedom of non-commercial use at this time.

While the original author of Slash, Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, no longer claims any sort of exclusive formal personal responsibility for Slash or even special authority over it, Malda, as well as Jon Pater, better known as CowboyNeal, are sufficiently well associated with Slash that their absence as figureheads would likely be problematic to any divergent project. And regardless, at this point in history, Slashcode faces sufficient competition from alternative similarly free, open source software solutions, many of which are now more robust, better documented and better supported than is Slashcode, that any project aimed at porting the code for example to an alternative language (e.g., PHP, Python) or an alternative webserver implementation (e.g., IIS) would face the problem, more than anything else, of perceived irrelevance, in light of the plethora of alternatives already satisfying its role. While both Slash and Slashdot are at the time of this writing still closely associated with Malda and Pater, the Slashdot.org website has not been solely owned and operated by its editors since its early days, having been acquired by Andover.net in 1999, an acquisition with which Malda said that he was happy (“New, Improved Slashdot,” 1999). Andover itself was subsequently acquired by VA Linux (“VA Linux buys Andover.Net,” 2000), putting Slashdot under the auspices of OSTG, VA’s Open Source Technology Group.

Culturally, Slashdot.org is very much defined by its roots as an open source project running on the Linux operating system, as a gathering place for information relevant to the open source movement and to Linux. In this respect, it is certainly an example of the ‘medium being the message’ or, somewhat less sensationally, but more to the point, the medium existing for the sake of self-commentary, seeing as a large quantity of news covered by the site deals with topics relevant to the technologies by which the site provides its content (Apache, Linux, Perl, MySQL) and the legal concerns it faces as a public forum (digital rights management, copyright law, censorship).

In practice, however, Slashdot, in keeping with its motto, “news for nerds,” tends to provide more than merely news on topics directly connected to open source and the Linux OS. Rather, it provides, perhaps in even larger proportion, news which simply happens to be of interest to readers within the open source community, whatever the category of such news should happen to be. That is to say, rather than choosing particular topic material and specialised content (as a site dedicated specifically to entertainment software, or specifically to server hardware, or to any other specific field might) with which to attract its audience, it has in effect chosen an audience (the open source movement and Linux community) and tailored content to the interests of that audience without much concern for ‘on-topic’ reportage. Consequently, much of Slashdot’s content has nothing to do either with open source software or with Linux.

Slashdot has succeeded through this approach in becoming the largest and most important news portal for its audience on the web. It has evidently, in addition, succeeded in picking up a large number of readers who may not initially have had any affiliation with the movement or even any passing interest in open source or Linux, but who as a matter of coincidence happen to share a sufficiently large number of specialised interests with the members of these groups that they find the site useful. As with many other blog journalists, the selection and specialisation of topic material is achieved by virtue of the creators and the editors themselves sharing these interests and applying subjective bias in choosing articles of interest to them and thus to the like-minded readership of the site. Articles and blurbs associated with the links provided by the site, meanwhile, are largely, if not exclusively, written by the readership themselves, providing all the closer a connection between content and audience interests.

Works Cited

Blog (2005, Sept 29). Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 30 September, 2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/Blog.

New Edition: Motswana to Mussy (2005, August 11). Oxford University Press. Retrieved 30 September, 2005 from http://www.oed.com/help/updates/motswana-mussy.html.

Is this the same code that runs Slashdot? (2005, August 22). Slashcode FAQ. Retrieved 30 September, 2005 from http://www.slashcode.com/faq.shtml#Slashcodecom1.

Slashdot HTML 4.01 and CSS (2005, Sept 22). Slashdot. Retreived 30 September, 2005 from http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/22/1324207.

New, improved Slashdot: Faster news for nerds (1999 Sept 20). CNN. Retreived 1 October, 2005 from http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/20/new.slashdot.idg/.

VA Linux buys Andover.Net (2000 Feb 3). CNET. Retrieved 1 October, 2005 from http://news.com.com/2100-1001-236456.html.