InfoPoo http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=infopoo
It's pretty funny seeing an idea go horribly wrong. It's even funnier when someone thinks 'I can do that', and totally ignore the fact that the marketspace they're shooting for has room for just the one player, and that player is in that position not due to technical brilliance, hard work, a flashy interface, or even a particularly useful piece of functionality, but due more to sheer dumb luck.
Such is the relationship between InfoQ and TheServerSide. InfoQ's idea is to basically take TSS, and make it usable, useful, and relevant. The end result? The deafening sound of a silent and mostly indifferent world.
There's something pretty embarrassing about seeing entry after entry boasting that ignominious '0 comments' stamp of shame. One might well wonder, what went wrong? Why does this site, to put it bluntly, suck so much ass?
There are a variety of reasons for this humiliating performance. The look of the site for example is too cartoony, but that's just icing on the shitpile. The problem really is with the content. The top level subjects seem to be less 'here's what relevant to subset X of the IT landscape' and more 'here's random stuff that's better suited to blog categories'. As a potential user, I have no interest in Ruby or .net, but that's fine, they're at least alternatives to Java, so the domain space is at least similar. SOA and Agile though....omgwtfbbq. How do these relate to the other categories? The community divisions mean that an entry has to be either in SOA or Java, but not both. Nevermind that SOA is still a rampant cloudfest, which results in the hilarious but likely unintended consequence of all SOAP related entries being filed under SOA.
By far the worst culprit though is the Agile section. 'Patterns for Daily Stand-up Meetings Published' might sound like some kind of dirty joke you'd read about here, but sadly, it's a real entry. The agile posts in fact are almost all about a prolific crowd that thrives on hunting out penises and gobbling up as much as possible. They're in fact a set of genetic mutants, where any trace of a gag reflex has been long since eliminated. What next, 'Agile sex in parking lots for TDD fuckstainwanktitshitnipplearsebandits'?
Even more hilarity of course can be found with the odd 'oops' moment. For example, they had posted the fact that ThoughtWanks is fucked, and owes VC's a ton of money, then within a couple of minutes pulled the story. Later on that day they posted a rather biased piece about it from a ThoughtWanker instead. Just so you all know, ThoughtWorks DOES owe a fuckload of money, they obviously won't be shut down due since nobody wins in that case, but it wouldn't be surprising if a few top level people suddenly decided to leave to 'focus on family' or for the VC to add in more people that actually know how to get their money back. It's pretty easy to hunt down an ex-TWer who has jumped ship and who'd happily reveal how much trouble they're in.
TSS is where it is due to dumb luck, nothing more, nothing less. It happened to be the only venue at the time that served up content of that sort, and through some freak accident of nature, the average readership for some reason ended up with a few IQ points higher than JavaLobby. Poor InfoQ thought it was some kind of winning recipe, and proves day by day now it really, really, isn't.