What makes being Slashdotted a special joy, though, is that the Slashdot community is notoriously questioning, critical, and sometimes even a little biting. So when you find out you’ve been Slashdotted, you’re simultaneously praising the gods of cyberspace and bracing for an onslaught of snark.

If a visitor from Slashdot doesn’t like the look, feel, or style of your site or your article, they won’t hesitate to let you know. One Xconomy article that got Slashdotted a while back was a multi-page piece, and all of the comments from Slashdot visitors were complaints about how annoying it was to have to hit “next page” three or four times to read the whole piece. Today, the very first comment on my Apple article from a Slashdot visitor—in fact, the comment that tipped me off that we’d been Slashdotted—focused on an (admittedly gratuitous) neologism in the first paragraph (the word was “mediasphere”) and on how amateurish the column logo looks. (I know that, but in my defense, the goofiness is partly intentional. And I’m planning on finding someone to design a better logo.)

So far the Slashdot entry about my piece has generated 526 comments on Slashdot, compared to about 20 comments on Xconomy itself. Sometimes I wish readers would stick with Xconomy’s own comment section to talk about our pieces. But on the other hand, a lot of the discussion over at Slashdot boils down to vituperative name-calling—as is the case with most online discussions involving Apple or Microsoft (not just those at Slashdot)—so it’s probably best kept within Slashdot’s walls.

I laughed at David Pogue’s lines today, in a blog post about reader response to his review of the Google Nexus One phone: “Veteran tech columnists know one thing very well indeed: If you write anything positive about an Apple product or negative about a Microsoft product, you get buried by hate mail and personal attacks. The only worse result is if you say something negative about an Apple product or positive about a Microsoft product, in which case you get exposed to the true ugliness of the human spirit (and sometimes, in fact, physical threats).” All true—and I guess I feel like I escaped today relatively unscathed.

This week, Jarvis took his slogan to the next level, launching a trio of products—a book, an iPhone application, and a photo-sharing community on the Web—intended to encourage all photographers, pro and amateur alike, to get more creative with their camera phones. This cross-media campaign is a brilliant concept—both as a digital-arts-education project and as a piece of self-promotion for Jarvis and his studio—and it also happens to fit in really well with the theme I’ve been writing about in this space throughout September in “Seven Projects to Stretch your Digital Wings,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, go spend $2.99 on Jarvis’s app, called “Best Camera,” and consider today’s column Project #8.

There are more than 1,300 photography-related apps in the iTunes App Store, but as far as I know, Best Camera is the only one that comes with a dedicated community of other iPhone users. The app allows you to take a picture with the iPhone’s built-in camera, apply a range of cool digital filters and effects, and then upload your finished photo to a gallery that’s constantly being updated, in real time, with new photos from other Best Camera users. You can give the photos you like best a thumbs-up, and browse photos either by popularity or recentness.

This is an excerpt from my September 25, 2009 World Wide Wade column. Click here to continue reading the column at Xconomy.