Slashdot is beyond resuscitation.

    I'm a news junkie. Specifically I'm a tech news junkie. Part of my morning routine involves scanning Google Reader to see what's new from a long list of tech news sites.
    One of the consistencies in my news feed for well over a decade has been the venerable tech news blog, Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff that matters, as the tagline put it. My Slashdot ID isn't one of the really low numbers and I've not used it much but it's low enough to date me to the early 2000s. The site has helped shape my outlook on Internet culture and brought me first news of some of the defining tech stories of the last decade.
    But all good things eventually decline. I first saw whispers that Slashdot was past it and Hacker News was the Place to Be a few years ago and though I followed HN I refused to believe that Slashdot was dead. Sure they sometimes took a day to post a story and there were the inevitable dupes, but nobody's perfect, you insensitive clod!
    This week however I finally see that Slashdot, the Slashdot that I used to know, is dead. Why? I'm at the epicentre of one of their stories. Well, I should say I was at the epicentre, they're not just a day late but a whole week late on a story that was all over mainstream media last Monday. Yes, my US colleagues chose 'GIF'(verb) as their Word of the Year and like your rather out-of-touch elderly relative Slashdot has caught up with a week-old newspaper on the day room coffee table and proudly announced the story as today's news.
    News for nerds, stuff that mattered a week ago. Worth following only for old time's sake.

2010 as viewed through Daily Express headlines

    A couple of years ago I was working in a small business centre in Oxfordshire, a building that was home to several small tech companies. We had a common room with a kitchen and dining area, and the building management provided us with a selection of daily newspapers.
    Among those papers were a high-end broadsheet, a red-top tabloid and the Daily Express. I became fascinated by the Express headlines over the year, and resolved to collect them, initially just for the ones barmy enough to make me laugh but later all of them for a collective analysis. This post is the result, an infographic that tries to capture the essence of a year as seen on the front pages of the Express.
    So why did the Express fascinate me? Here is a gloriously barmy  newspaper obsessed with cancer stories, lurid tales of illegal immigrants, and the UK housing market, using a colourful vocabulary all of its own to stir its readers into righteous anger over stories that very often have little relationship to the main news stories of the day. Everyone is furious or outraged in Express-land, we're under siege from miscellaneous foreigners and there is no Government decision or economic movement that is not designed to let down the Express reader. This continual negativity is offset with ludicrous non-stories proclaiming miraculous rises in the housing market or turning tentative conclusions in scientific papers into medical breakthroughs in the fight against cancer. Seeing what they had on the front page became part of the entertainment of my morning routine, there is nothing like a ludicrous headline over your morning coffee for starting the day with a laugh.
    The infographic shows some of the pretty pictures that can be gleaned from a year's Express headlines. A PNG version can be downloaded by clicking on the image or you can download it as a PDF from this Google Docs link. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed making it.