Slashdot has an ugly underside. This is the world of trolls. Trolls come in several flavors. The classic definition of troll is "an electronic mail message, Usenet posting or other (electronic) communication which is intentionally incorrect, but not overtly controversial." FOLDOC makes a distinction between "troll" and "

Slashdot uses a unique community moderation system to determine which user comments are most valuable. The basic idea is that each comment starts with a certain "value," expressed in points ranging from -1 to +5. Anonymous posts start with a value of 0, and signed posts generally start with a value of 1. Users can then choose which comments they see by selecting from a "threshold" menu button at the top of the list of comments. That's when the fun begins!

In the slashdot community, the concept of "time" is unusual. On slashdot's home page, news items appear at a rate of about one per hour. The "news" for the most part, isn't new at all--it consists of links to news stories previously published on other Web sites. Yet because slashdot's community has come to rely on slashdot as a source of news, readers frequently complain when a story is "old" or a "repeat." The notion that slashdot repeats itself is so commonly

It seems a bit silly to be posting this to slashdot, but according to the methods described by Geertz, it's a fundamental step. Geertz's method relies on "thick description"--careful description of even the most seemingly benign aspects of a community.

After 10 years as an editor and writer of college textbooks, I have decided to return to the fray: I'm now back in graduate school, as a master's candidate in rhetoric and composition. In graduate school, you are asked to do bizarre things like "ethnographic analysis." Since it is one of my favorite communities, I have decided to do an ethnographic analysis of Slashdot.

Jazzman's cafe at UNCC has already started playing Christmas music. Nonstop. In November. What used to be a cool hangout now isn't much better than a mall. What a grinch I am!

Another permanently recorded, immortalized, etched in stone journal entry. Better make it profound!

Time to test my journal. This will go down on my permanent record. oooh. scary!