slashdot'd

Yesterday (fri Feb 18 05), mSpace was slashdot'd. (Thanks to Marko Daniel for pointing out the significance of this).

My first experience with the slashdot community. As Spock would say, "Fascinating."

Interesting to me how ready people there were to hold forth - some at length - about their assumptions about the system without actually exploring beneath a cursory glance at the article the set off the steam release: an article in
the Register, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/semantic_web/.

Most of the entries for instance seized on the fact that currently the demo only supports mozila-based browsers. There was a tussle over whether or not it was right to ignore Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Judgements were flying about this - happily assuming or assigning intent, one way or the other, about goodness or badness of this decision.

Interestingly again, based on the likely number of developers on the site, i don't think anyone suggested Time as a possible factor in terms of deciding what to support: working with w3c standards compliant DOM manipulations gives us multiple browser support. Trying then to figure out how to adapt this for IE is possible, but for a research team, takes extra cycles that, in a time-limited project, were really much better spent elsewhere.

Even more interesting, that great discussion could largely be seen as a tangent to the issue at hand.

Don't mean to sound down on the slashdot exchange: met some cool folks the team wouldn't otherwise have encountered, and learned about some related projects that were new to all of us. That was great. Thank you to the person who kicked that off.

Also learned that we may need to do some work to expose more about the underlying part of the work so people at a glance can see what the semantic-webness of the project is.