What is the Slashdot Firehose?
The Firehose is a collection of all the content that appears anywhere on Slashdot. Everything from comments and journal entries to RSS feeds and story submissions go into the firehose, and you can filter and interact with them in a number of ways. The plus/minus box on the left side of firehose entry lets you vote on that particular piece of content; plus if you like it, minus if you don’t. A small context menu will appear when you select one, giving you the option of appending one of a few common, more descriptive tags. You can also expand the submission and use the tag box if you’d like to add a specific tag of your choice, such as “awesome” or “typo.” Voting and tagging is useful and helpful; it shows other firehose users what the interesting submissions are, and helps the editors decide which ones make it to the front page.
