A new favorite: Hacker Monthly

Hacker News is one of my favorite sources of technical news and discussion. There is usually a nice variety of articles on the front page and the conversations around them tend to be more thoughtful than at many, many other websites.

Recently, Hacker Monthly was launched. It is a print magazine, based on Hacker News. Consider it a monthly best-of. This project is not affiliated with Y Combinator. Instead, it is a rather nice example of the community: A Hacker News reader saw this as an interesting project, took the initiative and decided to make it happen. Lim Cheng Soon approaches the authors of recently most popular articles and asks for permission to reprint in Hacker Monthly. If granted, the article gets published.

The PDF version of the first issue is available for free. After looking through it, I decided to also order a printed copy. I am impressed by the presentation as well as the content: This first issue contains an excellent mix of articles aimed at people interested in technology, software development and startups.

Even though a lot of my news consumption has moved online, I still read plenty of print magazines. Hacker Monthly is going to be on my regular list from now on. I appreciate the format and like the fact that the articles presumably had a successful run on the Hacker News front page.

I do not actually want to check in on the site all that frequently to see if there is something particularly good that is being voted up. Sure, social news websites can leave you feeling as if you should be coming back frequently, lest you miss something important. Now, I may not feel so bad though.

I may even be able to train myself to exercise patience and simply look forward to the next issue.

digg’s story crisis

Wow. Starting with What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?, in which Digg’s CEO explained the deletion of user submissions due to copyright violation concerns a huge outcry occurred from the user base.

At the time of this writing the site is dominated by submissions/discussions pertaining to a single topic. It goes on, literally for pages.

Here’s just a small glimpse:

Later on, a change of pace from Kevin Rose:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

This is a nice demonstration of how much power the users of a social media site really have. They drive the content, they drive the discussion they can truly drive the direction of the site. For better or worse.

It will be very interesting to observe how digg will overcome the situation and how this will further develop.