The acquisition price is $20 million, which the companies say is the same amount the properties generated in revenue in 2011.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the sites, Slashdot is a user-generated tech news site. You used to hear the term “slashdotted” a lot, when as site got so much traffic from the site that its servers crashed. There’s actually a sizable Wikipedia entry about the “Slashdot Effect”.

SourceForge is an open sources software site for developers, and Freecode is a large index of Linux, Unix and cross-platform software and mobile apps.

Slashdot gets over 5,300 comments a day and 3.7 million unique visitors per month. SourceForge gets 40 million unique monthly visitors, and about 80% of them are from outside of the United States, according to Geeknet. Freecode gets about 500,000 unique visitors per month.

“The acquisition of these premier technology sites fits squarely into our strategy of providing content and services that are important to tech professionals in their everyday work lives,” said Dice Holdings Chairman, President and CEO Scot Melland. “The SourceForge and Slashdot communities will enable our customers to reach millions of engaged tech professionals on a regular basis and significantly extends our company’s reach into the global tech community.”

“We are very pleased to find a new home for our media business, providing a platform for the sites and our media teams to thrive,” said Geeknet Chairman Ken Langone. “With this transaction completed, we will now focus our full attention on growing ThinkGeek.”

ThinkGeek is Geeknet’s online shopping site…for geeks.

Programming languages are tools. Programs take data and manipulate it a way to create new, more valuable data. Thus, databases are vital to the success of a given program, as it is the core of the programming storing both the data to be manipulate and the resulting new information. (The only exception to this rule would be if you were using a database for logging purposes, which provides little benefit over a straight file logging system.)

Thus, shifting the debate between SQL and NoSQL to programming languages is like debating over a knife or spoon when choosing crunchy versus creamy peanut butter in a PB&J sandwhich. It’s irrelevant what tool we use to construct our sandwhich, assuming both tools can get the job done. The real questions revolve around the peanut butter, jelly, and bread to use (crunchy, grape, and toasted wheat, obviously).

Jeff actually does an ample job of demonstrating that the programming language really doesn’t matter. All mature programming languages have had ample time to make a variety of excellent SQL libraries. In fact, infant programming languages would be doomed to fail without adequate SQL libraries. So the inherit advantage goes to SQL, but even that advantage is minute. As a given NoSQL database grows in popularity, so will its available libraries.

Mr. Cogswell chose the absolute worst NoSQL example for his argument. MongoDB is one of the hottest NoSQL databases, and thus libraries for the popular database have been sprouting up with more frequency as it continues to gain popularity. The programming language argument would have been better suited to look at less popular NoSQL databases, like Neo4j, which only has official libraries for Ruby and Java. The programming examples Cogswell used were in node.js and C# – so he would have had to use unofficial libraries and/or the REST API of Neo4j.

The SQL vs. NoSQL debate will always be alive at the independent project level. Because of the CAP Theorem, a given NoSQL or SQL database will never be a one-size-fits all solution. The growing popularity of NoSQL databases are a result of new problems and new data models that traditional relational databases fall short of properly representing. Relational databases will always have a place in a majority of applications, but as developers become more aware of what NoSQL options are available and where each of these databases shine, the appropriate mix of both SQL and NoSQL will surface.

The news of these potential sales was made public via a Geeknet press release, which spells out the motivations behind the idea. Naturally, it’s all about money:

Ken Langone, Chairman and CEO of Geeknet, stated, “After much discussion, our management team and Board of Directors have decided to begin a formal review of our media business to realize the full potential of these valuable assets and maximize shareholder value. With more than 46 million total unique visitors last month, our media properties have a large community of engaged users and we are committed to creating the best online experience for them.”

While Geeknet’s properties may have been reduced to more of a niche site, with their high popularity days seemingly behind them, as the statement shows, they still draw respectable amounts of traffic. Furthermore, Slashdot still maintains a consistent amount of input from users that have stayed the course the with news aggregate/forum-based commenting system.

When you consider Digg’s fate after Kevin Rose exited with money in his pocket, the idea of these properties changing hands is almost unfortunate.

That’s not to say the potential new owners will gut these services by favoring content from big-name publications instead of relying on user submissions, but then again, considering the aftermath of Digg, it’s understandable where there would be apprehension from the loyal users. Furthermore, when you consider these properties are still viable, traffic-wise (46 million uniques in April), such a change in ownership could cause massive defections, perhaps to the waiting arms of Reddit.

As pointed out by TheNextWeb, despite these good traffic numbers, Geeknet lost money:

Earlier this month, the company announced financial results for the first quarter of 2012. During the quarter, Geeknet booked revenues of $22.3 million, compared to $19.9 million in Q1, 2011. However, the company posted a net loss of $2.1 million.

With that in mind, does it make sense for Geeknet to cut their loses and make whatever money they can from these still-popular web properties? If so, how does the idea of Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode being under new ownership strike you?

SlashdotTV offers access to a wide library of video content surrounding its highly engaged community of IT influencers. Users can browse content grouped by a number of criteria – title, subject, popularity and featured videos picked by SlashdotTV moderators.

Geeknet Media Vice President and Editor-in-Chief Stephen Wellman states that “SlashdotTV represents an evolution of the Slashdot site experience.” He adds, “since first launching video in January this year, we have seen tremendous growth in the numbers of video views and engagement. The launch of SlashdotTV gives our readers a deeper way to engage with the tech news stories and a great complement to our existing social commenting experience.”

About Slashdot:

Slashdot is the first and leading social media destination for
technology professionals and IT decision makers. Slashdot’s highly
engaged community of IT influencers share and socialize hundreds of
pieces of content every day, including news, analysis, peer questions,
and professional insight. Slashdot is a website of Geeknet Media, a
wholly owned subsidiary of Geeknet Inc. (Nasdaq:GKNT).

Hat tip to Geeknet Inc.

“After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it’s finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it’s time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*“, CmdrTaco posted on Slashdot.

Slashdot began when Rob Malda and Jeff Bates created it while undergraduates of Hop College. Eventually the site wound up in the hands of VA Linux Systems, where Malda ran it out of the SourceForge Inc. office in Dexter, Michigan. Though Malda has held numerous titles and roles over the years, he’s stated that his main role was just to “Make Slashdot Great“.

For those hoping that CmdrTaco would be sticking around in some capacity, he’s not. Essentially after he uploaded his resignation post to Slashdot, he lost his ability to post anything further. He states that’ll he’ll submit stories form time-to-time, but there is no guarantee they’ll make the cut.

“As part of my resignation, after this story appears I will lose the ability to post. For me, this is the most bitter pill to swallow. Posting stories has always been my favorite part of the job. I created Slashdot to share these stories with my friends from IRC and school. It was never ‘work’. Now I will have to go cold turkey. I’m walking away from the soapbox I built. I wish I could continue to post stories forever, but those closest to me know that if I maintained the ability to post, I’d never move on. I’ll continue to read Slashdot and hopefully my occasional story submissions will make the cut. My old mantra: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters still holds true here today. Nobody does it better.”

During his tenure CmdrTaco has seen some amazing events cross the front page of Slashdot. “The explosion of Linux. The rise of Google. The return of Apple. The Dot Com Bubble. The DMCA. 9/11. Wars. Elections. Numerous successful Shuttle Launches and one Disaster. Scientific Breakthroughs galore. Cool toys. Web2.0! Social Networking. Blogging! Podcasting! Micro-Blogging! The Lord of the Rings being filmed and an entire trilogy of new Star Wars.” But the most important to him was his proposal to his longtime girlfriend Kathleen Fent, which he did via the front page of Slashdot on February 14th, 2002.

It’s pretty fitting that CmdrTaco ended his last post as editor-in-chief with the line “thanks to every Slashdot reader for giving me your time all these years. I hope I’ve wasted it efficiently and enjoyably.”

It’s unclear at this time who will be named the new editor-in-chief, but they will no doubt have some big shoes to fill.

Digg came as a revelation to those of us worked in the trenches of IT departments when it debuted. Overnight, our regular source of breaking tech news, Slashdot, looked old, tired, and out of step.

Contrast that with the intriguing assessment of Digg published at ReadWriteWeb. The money quote: “We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.”

That’s happening by design. Although your friendly neighborhood techie may be a godsend when it comes to figuring out when your system needs an updated driver, he or she isn’t a profitable demographic for advertisers.

“Currently the most popular category is World & Business, which accounts for just over 22% of the total. The Offbeat category is now around the same as Tech, with 18-19%,” Richard McManus said in the report.

We like ArsTechnica, Gizmodo, and Engadget as much as the next geek. The ReadWriteWeb story shows how, even as the frequency of their front page appearances diminish on Digg, they still dominate the tech stories that do make Digg’s widely-read front page.

Fewer tech stories on Digg probably means fewer people using that category. McManus suggested they may be going to other sites like Reddit or Mixx; we’ll give ReadBurner a mention here.

We think techies took advantage of the available tools, like freely available feed readers, sprinkled in alerts on relevant topics courtesy of sites like Google or Yahoo, and built their own news destinations. That would be a true tech solution, building one to suit a need.

When writing an email at work, it’s safest to assume that the boss will see it – email monitoring systems are often in place.  Lawyers and courtrooms full of newspeople can also become involved, as Katheryn Hayes Tucker details.

In an article spread by Slashdot, Tucker writes, “It has now become routine even in civil investigations for computers to be subpoenaed so lawyers can look at e-mails and hard drives.  And one thing always leads to another. . . .  E-mails, text messages, BlackBerry communications all are potential time bombs if not worded thoughtfully and with discipline.”

So, while we can’t condone any immoral or illegal actions, employees would do well to type with care, or to not type at all – if a subject is especially sensitive, a quick stroll over to the next office might be in order.

As Tucker concluded (quoting Smith, Gambrell & Russell partner Matthew W. Clarke), “never say anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t want to see displayed on a giant screen in a court room in front of a judge and jury even years from now.”

Does Open License Mean Open Season?

Slashdot blew the whistle on John Wiley and Sons (Wiley) and author George Orwel (note the one "L") for publishing a Wikipedia article on the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. The article appeared without attribution in Orwel’s Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors as though they were Orwel’s words, and not the collective writers of the article on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia contributor "Ydorb," who prefers to remain anonymous, says he wrote much, but not all, of the text that appeared in Black Gold, and provides a side-by-side comparison at Wikipedia. Ydorb says he was informed of the situation via another contributor who had read the book, prompting him to put together the comparison page.

In response to a WebProNews inquiry, Wiley’s Susan Spilka issued the following statement:

"In Black Gold by George Orwel, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., published a credentialed author and a thoroughly-sourced book.  However, it appears that a specific passage from Wikipedia was inadvertently added by our author to the text without attribution. George Orwel has assured us this was not intentional and has asked that we rectify the situation. Wiley will provide corrections to all future reprints of this book and make the changes to the ebook version.

"We take this situation very seriously.  We earn our readers’ trust by producing quality works by reputable authors.   On rare occasions, mistakes happen.  When they happen, we appreciate being alerted and do what is necessary to rectify any problems."

While it appears that Wiley will be doing just that, the incident brings up some important issues regarding open licenses used for collaborative works, including software, on the Internet. Because of the terms of the licensing agreement and the nature of the work, Ydorb and other contributors may have had no other recourse aside from media coverage.

Like much open source software, Wikipedia content is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License, also known as "copyleft." This type of licensing says that content can be reused or repurposed verbatim, either commercially or non-commercially "so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement)."

But what if the attribution requirement is not met? Who will pursue the matter of infringement?

 Wikipedia says not them. Though the staff at the Wikimedia Foundation found the situation "frustrating," spokespersons agreed the company "doesn’t really take any position on this. It is not the copyright holder, the individuals who wrote the article in question are. They have licensed their contributions to the Foundation to get them into Wikipedia.

"Realistically all these folks can do if they feel aggrieved is appeal to public opinion via the media, it is expensive to pursue a copyright infringement case, and for material under GFDL the process would not be to extract money from the plagiarist, but to make them release their work under a compatible license."

And then there’s the problem of multiple anonymous contributors. "That it’s been edited raises very big factual questions," Technology and Marketing Law blogger Eric Goldman tells WebProNews. "Who did what to whom?" And because it’s under an open license, "it’s a little hard to object if somebody actually takes it."

At least in the case of the Khobar Towers article, it is clear that non-attribution is cause for infringement of the license. But there’s nobody willing to pursue the case, and if attribution is made eventually, it becomes a sort of no-harm-no-foul situation.

"This is a really great example of some of the problems with taking content off the Internet," says Goldman. "The publisher may not realize they’re giving their stuff away."
    

You can also go to the preview page for any feed and see its ranking, even if it isn’t in the top 1000, if you know its siteid. For example, this blog, with 54 subscribers, is ranked 22,975.

InsideGoogle is thankfully in 843 place. If you don’t like your ranking, you can claim multiple feeds your site has and consolidate them, so total subscriber count is given credit, rather than seperate Atom, RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91 feeds and so on.

In the first ranking, Slashdot’s 103,771 subscribers makes it #1. Dilbert is 10,000 behind, followed by Engadget. The official Google blog is eighth. Gizmodo is #17 and #74, and adding the two subscriber counts together could make it number 7. There are a good number of site’s that would rank much better if they consolidated feeds.

Check out the full list at beta.bloglines.com/b/topfeeds.

A post should be about this on Bloglines’ news page tonight.

Also, Bloglines shipped some minor improvements, continuing to improve beta Bloglines. I only spotted them because I live my life in Bloglines, but one of them made my life a hell of a lot better.

They changed the behavior of the “f” hotkey, which loads up the next folder of feeds. Instead of opening the folder, it keeps the folder closed and selects it, loading all feed items from that folder, exactly like I normally do with the mouse. Using the “f” key and “j” key, you can go down through items (”j,j,j,j”), then when you reach the end, load the next folder (”j,j,j,f,j,j,f,j”).

I’m breezing through my feeds now faster than ever before. They seem to have improved the performance as well, though that could just be my imagination.

Another improvement: The title bar now shows the number of unread feed items, as well as the number of items you’ve pinned. Whether you keep Bloglines open in a seperate browser window or in a tab, you will always have a cound of the number of unread items to rely on while you’re doing something else.

Finally, they made the address bar update with a unique URL based on what you are viewing. This way, if you hit refresh or restore a browser session, everything will be right back where you were, still reading the same feed as before.

So, another month, another update for Bloglines. What a great pace for them to be keeping up. Sure, its little things, but if Bloglines gets a little bit better every month, just imagine how amazing it can be in the long run. They really are listening to the users and giving people what they want. Gotta love it.

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Photos and Bill Pay appear ready to die quiet deaths, but this is not the case with Yahoo’s latest cut.  In reference to Musicmatch, “BanjoBob” writes on Slashdot, “There was nothing not to like about the product.  There is nothing to like about the new downgrade, Yahoo! Music Jukebox.  MusicMatch users have been getting notices to ‘upgrade’; those who have taken the bait are not pleased.”

A link then leads to the Yahoo Music Jukebox and Yahoo Music Unlimited Feedback forum, where there is long thread calling for a “CLASS ACTION SUITE!!!!!!!!!!” (among the 168 replies, more than a few have pointed out that it should be “suit”).  A sort of runner-up thread still contains 37 replies, and is titled, “‘unable to play media (unresponsive)’ error on Play.”

It’ll be interesting to see if the outcry has any effect on Yahoo’s plans, though that seems unlikely.  Still, while cutting back on products and services can be smart – unused ones are wasteful – trimming away at popular ones could alienate users.  Considering Yahoo’s position in respect to Google, that doesn’t seem like a wise tactic.