Weblogs grow in popularity: although benefits are there, engineering blogs are still relatively rare.(Internet)

When college student Rob Malda started his weblog in the mid-1990s, it was mainly a way for him to communicate with friends and other programmers. Today, his website slashdot.org--now really more of an uber-weblog--is one of the most popular sites on the Internet for techies. Though the primary focus of the site is open source software, every day between 60,000 and 100,000 users visit it to weigh in on a wide variety of in-the-news technical topics ranging from a discussion of the shuttle disaster to hydrogen-powered cars.

"When I first started Slashdot, it was for people I knew, mostly Linux guys writing code and working on open source applications. What happened then is that other people started noticing what we were doing, and we began to break on big news stories like the Mozilla open source announcement-and Columbine," says Malda, who sold the popular web destination to Andover.Net in 1999. For those not familiar with the concept, a weblog--blog for short--is a kind of online diary that typically features daily postings on a selected, topic (open source, software, digital copyright law, etc), includes links to other sites, and provides commentary on articles in the media. Though each is as unique as its author and subject, what all weblogs have in common is-that they allow members of a community to easily exchange information and interact with one another.

The first group to jump on the blog bandwagon in the mid-1990s was, not surprisingly, programmers like Malda who had a…