[humorix] Yet Another Portal: SlashGrok

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Yet Another Portal: SlashGrok
June 20, 1999

It may seem unthinkable, but every nerd eventually steps
away from the glow of their CRT, heads outside into the
bright sunshine, and embarks on a vacation.  A trip to a
beach paradise or a Linux exposition in a faraway place
often means that a nerd must endure an extended period of
time with Net access.  Upon returning home, a nerd is
inundated with megabytes of unread headlines and comments
at Slashdot and other nerd watering holes.  With so much
raw information to wade through, what is a nerd to do?

The answer: SlashGrok.  

A group of enterprising Dotheads has created what they call
a "super-mega-meta-portal-weblog" website called SlashGrok.
The site's motto, "We grok Slashdot so you don't have to",
sums up the goal of this project: to condense megabytes of
Slashdot headlines and material into a nice, short, sweet,
simple, easy-to-read page.

"We've taken the idea behind Kernel Traffic and extended it
to new heights," boasted one SlashGrokker.  "Returning from
a vacation can be a nerve-wracking experience.  Think of
all the information you have to wade through to catch up
with the rest of the Geek Universe.  Think of the slow
adfu.blockstackers.com advertisements that take forever to
load. Think of the morass of flame wars and "First
comment!" posts that must be weeded out to find one or two
gems of actually useful information. Think of all the time
that is wasted grokking all of this new material. There has
to be a better way.  We think we've found it."

The SlashGrok contributors summarize all of the day's
happenings on Slashdot into a single daily report.  One of
these daily reports looks something like this:

===

SlashGrok for June 18, 1999
"We Grok Slashdot So You Don't Have To!"

Synopsis:

We analyzed 15 Slashdot articles containing 561 comments 
for a total of 742Kb.  We ignored 13 "First comment!"
posts, 15 obvious flame-bait posts, and 33 other posts
devalued by the moderators to -1.  Out of the remaining
comments, we spotted 2 actually interesting posts. A total
of 13 sites were hit with the Slashdot Effect during the
day, causing 2 of them to crash as a direct result.


Headlines:

A question on the storage capacity of the human brain was
posed. The most common response was "Will Linux ever be
ported to the human brain?"...

You can run NetBSD on the iMac now (though why you would
want to is an interesting question in itself)...

The first Apple I ever is up for sale but the question
remains:  "Does it run Linux?"

DivX is dead; like it wasn't a brain dead idea to start
with...

VA Linux Systems is "Cool" according to those hipsters over
at Fortune...

John Katz reviewed "Nudist on the Late Shift" but I have no
idea what that is about...


Cool quotes and slogans:

"World domination: coming soon to a computer near you!"

"Every time I think that perhaps we are an advanced race, I
turn around and read ramblings on Slashdot, and realize I
was wrong."


We hope you enjoy SlashGrok.

===

While the SlashGrok service is only a week old, it has
enjoyed tremendous success.  The Dothead who first invented
the SlashGrok idea said, "Our site, which makes use of two
hot buzzwords, 'portal' and 'Weblog', is causing many
Venture Capitalists to drool.  I don't see how this site
could possibly fail, unless all of us happened to take a
vacation at the same time."


---

James S. Baughn
http://i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/


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