Sun sets on the old Techrights

Summary: Experimenting with a new format that accommodates more posts and possibly making this new format permanent

The daily links have been expanding in terms of scope over the years and a lot of items did not get as much attention as they deserved. Starting next month (after our summer vacation) I will finally make the changes that I inquired about over the past year or two. Techrights will expand its scope of coverage to make up for the vacuum left by closure of some important sites. There will be focus on external references and the old topics will still take priority. I will experiment with the new format over the coming week and if it's reasonably useful to readers, then this will be the way forward.

In order to understand this new format it is essential that I explain how I do my research. I am subscribed to hundreds of feeds, some of which are multi-site aggregators. I read through them and then organise them, later to decide what I have time to write about. What I cannot afford to cover given time limitations I will typically add to the next bunch of daily links. A lot of journalists work in the same way, give or take a step.

Daily links give no convenient opportunity to add a personal interpretation or tie together items other than by vicinity or chronology. It would be more valuable to split what is currently just a compilation of daily links and instead publish analysis which deals not only with FOSS but other subjects too. This will increase the amount of output and make it easier to navigate through news (by headlines, dates, and so on). In essence, there will be long articles for topics which are important and shorter ones with links appended where the topic merits lesser attention.

It is hard to say how this will scale w.r.t. time, hence I will give it a trial period of less one week and then decide if it's sustainable.

On another final note, there is no denying that there is less FOSS news coverage than there used to be. It does not mean that FOSS has become irrelevant; it is just being taken for granted and increasingly -- like IBM -- it becomes a quiet giant (few cover the Linux and FOSS aspects of Android for example). What's increasingly needed right now is advocacy that expands/ties software freedom to justice and rights like privacy. Not many sites connect those different strands; even fewer do so after Groklaw ceased publication. Later this year this site will turn seven, so now is a good time to readjust format, maybe the layout too (at a later stage). ⬆