739Like Slashdot, Only Worse

A big un-Thank you to those that lead the charge to resuscitate SlashGeo when it was on its last gasp. Re-aggregating old news does not add to the conversation, geo or otherwise. Kudos to you Sean for your Planet GS greasemonkey script so that I do not have to bother with such drivel in my reader.

But what about eating a Bison Burger?

The signal to noise ratio on Planet Geospatial is so small now that I just stay away instead of filtering.

Hello Sean, I'm Alex, the main enthusiast behind Slashgeo. I am not the one who wrote the story you are referring to. We have about 7 active "editors", all volunteers, no revenue other than minor donations, including no ads. I hope I'll have the chance to meet you some day Sean (and why not, Matt too :-). I like your blog's content and general way of expressing your opinion. I understand Slashgeo.org is not targeting people like you at the moment, who already keep themselves very well informed of what's going on in our dear geospatial community. However, I don't understand why you have such a pleasure to hate us. We gain nothing other than the relative satisfaction of providing a good service for a community we love. With now over 1,500 registered members and over 6,000 daily unique IP addresses reached, at least some people seems to be satisfied with what we do and that's why I (and other editors) spend so much personal time on this project. Sure, at the moment, the number of pertinent user comments on Slashgeo is rather low, but hey, it has to start somewhere. I guess our actual readers are interested in our aggregation of the "most pertinent geonews" (yes, that's subjective) out there. Not everyone has the time or will to monitor several RSS feeds. For your information, Slashgeo also has a lot of stories which are not featured on PlanetGS (which I am no longer reading until my return to office from parental leave). I hope one day you'll help us instead of demolishing our efforts made of good intentions. Sincerest regards, Alex for Slashgeo.org

As high profile as your site is, you must expect some feedback when you post a worthless or even harmfully misinforming (more rare, fortunately) news item, right?

I don't consider Slashgeo high profile :-) Let's be honest, it's a small site useful to some but not that many (or at least not the geospatial community as a whole). Maybe if we ever attract a critical mass of users the discussions on Slashgeo will become particularly challenging and informative? We're not there yet. In my opinion, one reason for this is fragmentation: a lot of geobloggers share great information and opinions, but the best bits are scattered on the web. I originally wanted Slashgeo (registered non-profit and ad-free) as a place to gather the geospatial community together. Time will tell whether we'll succeed or not and to which extent. If it fails, so be it (I'll recover a lot of free time! :-), at least we provided a tool thousands of geospatial professionals will have appreciated for a few years (and several others will have despised ;-). And yes, I'm all for constructive criticism. In fact, that's one of the very goals of a community-oriented website: improve ourselves with the help of others. I dare end this comment with a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (sorry, I was a quote fan a decade ago :-): "If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything". That's why I prefer constructive critics. Regards Sean -