The MATLAB contest got Slashdotted over the weekend. The Slashdot thread linked to our contest pages but also to my paper hosted here on this site: In Praise of Tweaking: A Wiki-like Programming Contest. So we’ll see how much extra traffic I get to my site as a result.
I have always thought that the contest would be the kind of thing that Slashdot folks would like. Interestingly, the person who posted the thread observes “What makes the contest truly interesting is that the final phase is open source.” I agree with his assessment, of course, but it had the unfortunate side effect of making a lot of Slashdotters noisily point out that MATLAB itself is not open source, which is true enough, but a little beside the point. This observation ends up soaking up a lot of the conversation, but hey, it’s Slashdot. I’ll take what I can get.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 
One thing I’ve noticed on other sites that have been slashdotted is that while there’s a tremendous spike of traffic, almost none of it stays. It’s like the slashdotters out there have to play a huge game of tag, touching base with the website in question before scurrying off.
Wow. I just now read the Slashdot comments, and I must say that it was nice of them to prove the whole “message boards lead to flaming” part of your writing. God bless the internet for useless arguments, and God bless the slashdotters who cause primal stirrings in the lizard part of my brain that wants to beat them up and take their lunch money.