This new system has been set up by the Slashdot admins because unlike some news sites, the news that makes the front page is moderated by a group of admins, rather than chosen by popular opinion.
This has its ups and downs, The best part about this kind of moderation is that news that des make the front page is really good news.
However it means it can be old news as the moderation time can be lengthy.
This new Firehose system is designed to flag the popular stories up for the admins via a rating system.
Anyway, enough talk, lets take a look shall we?
The basic interface lets you select between rating Journals, Stories and things I have rated.
You rate a story by clicking a nice little 'Thumbs up' or 'Thumbs down' icon on each story.
The little icons on the top right of the Firehose header bar are for sorting through stories, so you can find those hot stories faster, or find the ones that are yet to be discovered.
You also get an extra option where you can save custom filters. You just click the 'Unknown' link and type in a filter like 'story Linux' for Linux only only stories:
You can also see in this screenshot more clearly the temperature style filter too. The coloured bar lets you scroll between hot stories (Red) and the not so hot stories (Black).
When you change filters the list below refreshes dynamically with AJAX. This is pretty slick looking, and it didn't lag up much, apart from when you select all stories and it spends a while organising them and sliding things about.
It was pretty hard to get a screenshot of this, obviously, but here is a mid-refresh shot as it loads a new filter:
So all in all I'd give it a 8/10.
It has a purpose, and this system carries it out very well. However it wasn't all too intuitive, unlike other rating sites from YouTube with its star rating system to Digg and its very basic one click rating.
I'll leave you with a nice colorful screenshot, probably what I like best. Slashdot is usually a very dull site to look at, but this looks very modern and the bright colours of the temperatures really stick out.
