When Rob Malda founded Slashdot, all he wanted was a place on the Internet where he and his friends in Holland, Mich., could talk about stuff they liked: computers, the Linux programming language, science fiction—geek stuff. "There weren't any websites doing the subject matter I wanted," says Malda, who lives in Holland, Mich., and goes by the nom-de-nerd Commander Taco. "It all just kinda grew out of that, very, very informally." By the time Slashdot was officially launched in 1997, the Net was hot, and geek culture was hip. Now, hyped only by word-of-mouth, no in-your face TV spots and no three-story billboards, Slashdot has a membership in the hundreds of thousands and logs well in excess of a million hits a day.

Malda has taken the idea of what news can be, hacked it open and rebuilt it for the Internet age. Slashdot's secret weapon is the collaborative power of the Web. Malda and the other editors don't write the site's stories. Instead it is Slashdot's readers who send in the news. In effect, Malda has an army of reporters working for him, and as a result Slashdot often scoops the mainstream media. Case in point: when Netscape decided to give away the source code of its browser, one of the biggest tech stories of 1998, Slashdot was first on the scene.