Slashdot!
My goodness. I just did a search on my middle name, which I use as a username in a lot of places, and discovered that my submission to Slashdot of the DARPA Idea Futures story got posted! I almost didn't even try, 'cause every time in the past that I've submitted a story to Slashdot, it's turned out to either be incredibly well-known already, or a popular item that everyone else is submitting too. And because there was no chance it would get posted, I didn't bother to go back and check later that day. But not only did it in fact get posted at Slashdot, it got 666 comments with a score of 1 or higher. Cool beans! Not only that, but CmdrTaco (Slashdot founder(?)/guy in charge) said (about the Bloomberg article I pointed to): "Read this article. I mean it. This is amazing."
Now I wish I'd listed SH as my home page instead of this journal. Would've been a good traffic-driver. Ah, well.
I always feel a little odd submitting stuff to Slashdot or Boingboing. (This was the first item I've submitted to both places—usually I just go straight for Boingboing as the place more likely to be interested and to not have had it submitted already—but at least I told the Boingboing people I'd just submitted it to Slashdot.) Part of me hopes for the whuffie that accompanies being the first to post a cool new thing; part of me worries that it'll turn out to be something well-known and/or boring and that the people in charge of choosing things to post will downgrade my whuffie on their personal whuffiemeters (even if nobody else knows or cares what I submitted). One wants to look good in the eyes of the Übergeeks. And there's no feedback other than seeing that the item was posted or not posted (well, okay, at Slashdot non-chosen items are explicitly marked as rejected on a user's options/setup page), so (much like someone praying to a deity, or for that matter a writer submitting a story to a market that doesn't send rejections) I find myself wondering for days whether an item's going to be accepted or not. I even go back to the site more often than usual for a couple days after submitting something, hoping to see my contribution show up.
Which is particularly silly given that most of my contributions are second-hand, things that various people (often Will) have pointed me to, so it's not like I really deserve any whuffie accrual anyway. But there's still that urge to be first to make the cool stuff known to a particular audience.
Come to think of it, the feeling may be somewhat akin to my jealousy when I see a good story published elsewhere and wish it had been sent to SH first so we could accrue whuffie for having been the ones with the vision to publish it.
(And yes, I realize that this entire post disqualifies me from ever joining the ranks of the Übergeeks, because they're much too cool to care about whether their articles get posted to Slashdot. But, hey, this is my first time, so be nice to me.)
