Rob Malda, the founder of the largest blog, Slashdot, will be in Blogak 2.0 next May 24th. Malda is 31 years old and created Slashdot as a science fiction and technology news website back in September 1997. It was later sold to the Open Source Technology Group, which belongs to VA Software. Malda keeps running the site, though, together with Jeff Bates and Robin Miller.

The software that runs Slashdot is called Slash and is completely free. Its Spanish clon Barrapunto is based on the same software. It is known for including comments with all stories and by the fact that the stories themselves are generally submitted by readers, with editors accepting or rejecting them.

Some people think it is not exactly a blog, but its architecture is exactly the same. To prevent abusive comments, a moderation system has been implemented whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) has a score (which starts at 0) and which can be incremented or decremented by semi-randomly chosen moderators. When moderating, the moderator actually chooses a given descriptor (such as “insightful”, “funny”, “troll”) and each descriptor has a positive or negative value associated with it. As such, posts not only are scored, but characterized (“20% insightful, 80% interesting”).

Moderation points added to a comment are also added to a user’s karma score. Having high karma gives one bonus point to posts made by that author. (Being a registered poster adds one more, so that the highest normally achieved starting score is two). Slashdot editors, including Rob Malda (“CmdrTaco”), can moderate limitlessly. This system is in fact very similar to that of Digg and its Spanish clons, suchs as Meneame or Fresqui.

Famous or well-known active “Slashdotters” include:

* Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales (username “jwales”)
* actor Wil Wheaton (username “CleverNickName”)
* id Software technical director John Carmack (username “John Carmack”)
* Nmap author Fyodor (username “fv”)
* GNOME and Mono architect Miguel de Icaza (username “miguel”)
* Freenet creator Ian Clarke (username “sanity”)
* ReiserFS creator Hans Reiser (username “hansreiser”)
* open source evangelist Bruce Perens (username “Bruce Perens”)
* MySQL CEO Marten Mickos (username “martenmickos”)