Older blog entries for mcelrath (starting at number 0)

I can't imagine who would read this. I can't imagine who would read this and care what I have to say. That said, this looks like a great place to rant and rave about various topics, with a couple of serious drawbacks:

  1. There is no way for people to post comments about my diary entries.
  2. If there were a way for people to post comments about my diary entries, there's no way to know where an interesting discussion is taking place.

That said, I hope Advogato gains this functionality someday. I'm sick of slashdot. It was the first, but there are clear ways to improve the whole web-based discussion forum idea, and the slashdot folks have a good thing going and zero interest in exploring new ideas. I've recently run into advogato, zope based sites and scoop based sites. Time will tell whether they're going to gain a stronghold, or be better than slashdot. Personally, I'd like to see forays into different types of community moderation. Certification is interesting. But it looks like it has the drawback that there are just too many people to certify. There may well be other developers here that I've interacted with, but how would I know? The list of members is a 500k document! I suppose as articles are posted and I run into other people I may recognize and certify some. But who would care about certifying me?

This place would be an interesting way for OSS developers to interact, but it doesn't seem well organized for much more than a slashdot clone. Why not comments attached to projects? Why not topic pages where more general programming things could be discussed (i.e. HTML/web-dev, client-server design, CORBA/other distributed object systems etc). And of course comments directly to other developers. How about a search system (search through comments). How about a moderation system? (Just because a person is a developer doesn't mean all his comments interesting)

Booga booga.

If you read this, drop me a line. Just curious. Of course, I know well through running an OSS project that has on it's front page "mail me if you get it working"...3000 downloads later and I've gotten mail from maybe 5 people. ;)

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