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Does this look familiar? Long after being usurped by Digg as the distracting tech news site geeks read at work, social news site Slashdot has launched Firehose, an area of Slashdot where users can give a "+" or "-" vote to news stories. The site has been available to logged-in users for some time, but launches to everyone today.
They're innovated on the interface: stories are assigned a color from red (hot) to violet (cold). Cold stories are contracted to just the headlines, similar to "buried" comments on Digg, and there's a color filter that allows you to choose what color spectrum you want to view. The hottest stories are selected by the Slashdot editors to make the frontpage, meaning Slashdot has gone partway to being Digg, albeit with an editor deciding what goes on the frontpage.