Reading
Hypertext
Much like Patchwork
Girl, slashdot has links that lead you to
golden treasures, as well as black holes. The funny part is that
both golden treasures and black holes are hard to tell apart.
This is mostly due to usefulness. For example, in Patchwork Girl
I often found myself intrigued by fragments, more then whole
pieces of the story, which makes me wonder if I was suppose to
be enjoying the story or the fragments. In slashdot, the same
often happens, the big stories of mergers or life changing discoveries
often bore me, but little stories such as a review of a specific
video card might have my attention for 3 hours.
I do feel however that PWG and Slashdot greatly
differ in regards to their ease of use. While slashdot’s hyperlinks and text
size is easy for me to read, PWG’s layout of hyperlinks
and text size left much to be desired. I do understand PWG was
cutting edge for its time; however, since its release hypertext
as a genre has moved forward by leaps and bounds. For example,
in general hyperlinks are easily identifiable and good websites
allow for text zooming. Though one thing I find mis-leading about
slashdots hyperlinks is that they all look the same but lead
you to different places. Visually this is misleading and can
often confuse the reader.
In
terms of a hypertext, slashdot set the standard for geek news
in the 90's, many publications have since copied them, such
as tomshardware.com, eweek.com and many others. However, I
believe that unlike
PWG, slashdots interface has grown with time and matured, deeming
it still usable.