Let’s start at the beginning. Once upon a time there were two guys named Hemos and Commander Taco who wrote a web program called Slash. It allowed
a variety of users to submit short articles containing web links for
community approval, consideration and commentary. During the Dot Com
boom of the late 1990s, they became mega-jillionaires when the popularity
of the site they called Slashdot skyrocketed and drew literally hundreds of thousands of
member-contributors.

Another guy named Rusty thought this was a neat idea and wanted to do a
similar site for social commentary, not just technogeek stuff like
the submissions that were coming into Slashdot on a regular basis.
He wrote a similar web program called Scoop and set up a website called kuro5hin that
is a pun on his first name. Rusty = corrosion = kuro5hin, since
hackers often use the number 5 to represent the letter s to look
“cool.”

Rusty put Scoop in the public domain, and now dozens of people are
running their own personal websites based on his Scoop program.
SciScoop is one of these, a community site with a science orientation instead of a
social commentary or computer technology emphasis.

The basic idea here is that if you’ve got something to submit, you click
on the submit story link and write it up as an article of a few
paragraphs, preferably with scattered web links. Your submission is
then rated by the site Members and if enough of them vote that it’s
good enough, then it’s ‘posted’ to the front page.

Slashdot and kuro5hin are by far the biggest such community sites on the Internet because they were the
first. On SciScoop we have “only” about 600+ members and if a majority of
only 4 of them vote “yes” on a submitted article, it goes on the front page
automatically. Rusty’s original kuro5hin site has around 35,000
members, and getting an article on the front page there requires a 95
vote majority – since it’s a more popular site, kuro5hin has become more selective.
Sciscoop is still getting off the ground and at this point will put
just about anything up within reason.

Similarly, any readers can comment on our SciScoop posted articles by clicking on the
“post a comment” link at the bottom of the article -
usually after clicking the “full story” link first
to see the whole article. If they’re a member, their comments are
posted with their member name attached. If they’re not a member,
their comments are posted under the general pseudonym “Anonymous
Hero”. (On Slashdot, it’s Anonymous Coward.) Thus there tend
to be LOTS of comments from Anonymous Hero, but these are really many
submissions from many individuals, all under the same name.

The goal of Slashdot and kuro5hin and SciScoop and lots of other
similar sites is to become not a weblog or diary of a single person
like rickyjames but instead to become a “meeting place”
where MANY people come to express their views. These people can be
very different from one another, which makes for interesting reading
as they interact, discuss and even argue. That’s why it would be
perfectly appropriate for a Creationist or Anti-Abortionist or Health Rights Crusader or Genetically Modified Food Opponent or Alien Abductee to start posting articles at SciScoop even tho others might personally view such an articles as
pseudo-science or inflammatory. We sure wouldn’t mind articles about cool general interest science topics from Scientists and Scientist-wannabes, either. Sciscoop is meant to
a forum for EVERYBODY’s ideas and interests, as long as a majority of only 4 members think the submission is worthwhile. Of course, it can take a thick skin
to take the barbed comments by others that will attach themselves to articles that are more
outlandish or political than factual…

Community sites like SciScoop face a chicken and egg problem. Nobody
will routinely come to read them unless there’s interesting daily
content, but there’s no interesting daily content until lots of
people visit routinely. Breaking this cycle requires somebody to
come to the plate and prime the pump (sometimes for a LONG time) by
writing a continuous stream of articles that people will show up to
read. For Sci-Fi Today, that somebody was Drog, and for SciScoop it’s rickyjames. Obviously this gives the site a “flavor” of the
initial main writer, but traditionally as time goes on more and more
people show up and the mix becomes a stew instead of a broth stock.

That’s where you come in, dear reader. Whether you think of yourself as
a writer or not, you can be. If you are thoughtful and articulate,
those are qualifications enough. If you don’t feel yourself to be
technically inclined enough to submit articles (which can just be
uncertainty and unfamiliarity rather than a true
state of affairs; don’t ever underestimate yourself!), then by all means just post comments – your personal heartfelt thoughts, technical or not -
on any story you read on SciScoop. By reading what you wrote,
hopefully other “lurkers” who are readers-only at present
will begin to offer THEIR opinions – and so SciScoop will transition
from a news site to a True Community, and that will be a Good Thing during our Second Year.