OPEN SOURCE PUBLISHING
Nostalgic for the chaotic, grassroots Web of yesteryear? Follow the latest wave of die-hard tech-heads to Kuro5hin.org, a technology and culture site that operates comfortably with a full-time staff of one, relies on word-of-mouth for new visitors, and lets code and its users - rather than a fat edit staff - take care of the writing and editing.
K5 is loosely modeled after Slashdot: Submitted text appears immediately in an editing queue, where readers can peruse it, post responses, and then vote, Survivor -style, to decide whether the story will appear on the front page, be placed in a subsection, or get killed. K5's 24-year-old founder, Rusty Foster, has operated from his San Francisco apartment with help from a part-time sysadmin and a handful of volunteers since the site's debut in December 1999.
K5 initially ran Slashdot's free, Perl-based software. But when users began to show up in droves - now there are nearly 135,000 visitors a month - Foster scrapped the code and rebuilt the site from scratch.
Because its software is open source, K5 already has offspring sites of its own. Slashdot founder Rob Malda says this was inevitable, adding that as K5 gets bigger, "someone else will pop up and be the real underground hangout as that restless group moves on once again."
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Spawn of Slashdot
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DVD Hacking for Dummies
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Fiesta Americana
Raw Data
