Rob Malda, aka "CmdrTaco," founded Slashdot 10 years ago as a way to share online stories with a small group of close friends.
This month, as Slashdot celebrates its 10th anniversary, CmdrTaco is doing the same thing, except that now his group of friends has swelled to 250,000 readers each day and millions of page views (and 5.5 million visitors per month).
Malda has become a bit of a kingmaker, though this has never been his intention. Slashdot can give a company a massive launch to a new project or can dig it a public-relations hole from which it is hard to extricate oneself.
I spent a half hour talking Malda today, trying to plumb the secrets of how to get "Slashdotted" and to decipher Slashdot's effect on the technology world. In the process, it became clear that Slashdot has succeeded precisely because it exhibits the principles of successful open-source and Web 2.0 companies, including an unyielding focus on the customer experience.
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