As one of the many faceless among the masses, I also offer my humble thanks for your work, Rob. I graduated HS in 1997, and between working between my first intern job and starting college, the sysadmin at my company suggested I start looking at a site called Slashdot. I followed the site ever since, mostly by directly visiting and in recent years by RSS feed. Over the years I've been exposed to countless meme's, in-jokes, hated authors, anonymous cowards, and definitely the most entertaining and pertinent technology opinions and articles that I've ever had the pleasure of reading. As a CS student, Slashdot encouraged me to get involved with Linux, PHP, and MySQL to create my own CMS, and I thank you for that inspiration. I'm glad to say that we did have a chance to at least meet briefly while the Atlanta area still hosted annual Linux user events (though most times we crossed paths it was when you greenlit my article submissions). Personally, I think you and Slashdot helped set the bar for many technologies and trends to come later: user-submitted and moderated stories (Reddit/Digg), you shared your life with us before it became the social norm (Facebook/Twitter), and produced a fanbase of techies hungry for emerging technologies (like Google, as you mentioned). There is so much more that I can ramble on about, but I'll stop there and just say thank you.
