Slashdot is still going strong, incredibly strong. Ten years ago there was no voting API or AJAX that could do the job, but it didn’t take more than a handful of dedicated people with a good idea. Slashdot has had user journals where an individual could post stories, thoughts, anything, which would sometimes make it to the front page, usually not. It had a method of friending people so their stories and submissions could be filtered and more easily followed. This was years before Facebook and the word blog entered the common vocabulary.

Now, in 2008, some newspapers are asking for and sometimes publishing user-submitted contributions, but as a whole they seem reluctant and hesitant, 10 years after it first became successful (admitably in a tech-savvy niche), and the ones that do it well seem to celebrate their own success and ‘originality’. The horse has already bolted, it will take a lot more than to rename columns blogs and stick an ‘add to del.icio.us’ link next to an article.

I have some ideas about the future of information retrieval and it’s not hugely Google-centric, at least in Google’s current format. SEO, and second-guessing SEO is doing strange things to search results. I did a search for ‘Asus EEE’ yesterday, to find the manufacturer and wikipedia pages on it near the top (fine) but the undisputed best informational resource pushed down to number 9 by companies selling the EEE, that is not useful.

All in all, filtering is difficult but very doable if one has a good idea.