Slashdot gets into the social news scene with the public launch of Firehose:
The Slashdot Firehose is a collaborative system designed to allow users to assist our editors in the story selection process. The hose contains submissions, RSS Feeds, journals and Slashdot stories, each color-coded along the color spectrum to indicate popularity. Red is hot, violet is not. Try tagging and voting on the entries below, and by using the 'feedback' menus.
The news for nerds now has user–generated content like some of the other, much younger sites (*cough*Digg*cough*reddit*cough*). Pete Cashmore at Mashable! says bloggers drive traffic, but when did /. not bleed traffic?
It'll be interesting to see what goes on with this within the Slashdot users. The best part of the site isn't the stories, or even commentary, it's the users and their explanations. Lots of good old fashioned Digg–bashing down in the announcement story, such as this, and just plain old really funny, such as this.
