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Bruce Perens' Technocrat.net website is typical in many ways of the high-tech weblog. It's based on squishdot and is, therefore, lacking the latest Slashdot innovations such as comment moderation. The mature and responsible "Technocrat" userbase, however, makes the absence of such controls almost irrelevant.
The site has a clean design throughout and is easy to understand and navigate. Users can post comments about articles. Further, users can contribute articles, although these are not automatically posted. The article submissions are subjected to an approval process before they are included in the public pages.
The stated focus of Technocrat.net is technology policy and the subject matter is modern geek, ranging from "Kitchen-Table Technology" and "Scientific Research" to "Ham Radio" and "Cryptographic Policy".
I did not find a direct link to search the articles by topic. With the quality and quantity of the articles and the interesting subjects, putting the topic search on the front page would be a valuable addition. Now, with a relatively small database, the supplied keyword search is adequately responsive -- and it drops you off to a page that does let you search by topic or author. I used the topic search to search for all articles and comments in the "Miscellany" topic and, after about 20 seconds was presented with 407 titles.
Technocrat.net is a useful resource for information and links related to government policies that impact technology, especially computers, the Internet, cryptography, and other issues related to free speech and private communications.
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