These are the posts that other people found interesting, insightful, informative, funny, trollish, offtopic, and otherwise attention-grabbing. Someone bothered to moderate the posts you're looking at. So, right off the bat, it's a selection of the best, worst and most entertaining posts that you're looking at.

Then, there's the bit that pleases my short attention span : they're posts from all over, from whenever, probably stories and posts that you'll miss even if you read /. every day. Occasionally you have to check out the context to see what's going on, but mostly you're just jumping from random topic to random topic. That's pretty fun.

Of course, a key component of the fun of meta-moderating is in judging the judges. We all like to judge, and especially we like to judge the judgmental. Doing civic duty by bolstering the /. moderation system is just icing on the cake.

I think this is actually a great idea... I'd like to expand it a bit to have a separate list of companies we like, but that's less important.

Here's a start, for the list we all know is most important, the "hate" list :

MSFT SCOXE SCOX IFLB.OB SNE RNWK TWTC

Honestly, the "love" list is ( oddly enough ) likely to be longer just because of the number of companies that now support Linux, along with the companies that just generally make nice with OSS. I'll save that list for a later entry, though, because we all know it's more fun to kick SCO than to talk about IBM, Novell and Red Hat...

If you've read this far, can you take a couple of minutes to look up the stock symbol of a company which should be on either list but hasn't been mentioned yet, and share that symbol in the comments below? Thanks. You guys rock... but then, you knew that...

Does anyone have or know of a site that will host these lists for us, collecting and displaying the market data? For the time being, I'm going to just track them in my own "my yahoo" page, just because I can't think of a different place to get the data, but if there was a page everyone could look at... well, you might get some traffic...