05.08.11
Signal Versus Noise
Signal:
Gossip/noise:
Summary: Why Techrights looks at the issues and not the gossip, despite the popularity of the latter
Back in the days of massive growth, some time around 2009, Techrights posted a lot of site news — news which is different in nature from real news that matters. The reason was, the site came under many attacks (not just DDOS) and these attacks needed to be documented and explained for the benefit of others who came under similar attacks. The downside of such posts is that they reduce the signal of the site and therefore they serve those who sought to disrupt the site, In 2010 we posted at a very good pace and covered a lot of areas that needed to be covered.
At this point, having covered so many areas, themes, and different types of spin, there is a good gathering of detailed posts (clustered together) to rebut a lot of the false claims made repeatedly by proprietary software giants. There is usually a link or even a dozen that can be attached to bits of news that are hostile towards GNU/Linux. In order to reduce repetition, we no longer cover some important issues that are somewhat of a deja vu. Instead, sometimes these are added to Daily Links. Concision has its merits*.
In many similar debates, either in IT or totally outside of it, the same situation occurs. Basically, people whose advocacy involves a certain message (or set of related messages) sooner or later realise that there is a lot or repetition and most ground has already been covered. It can be addressed by citation. In fact, even repetition of complete sentences might do. Longtime followers get bored by this however.
Earlier this year we covered a lot of Microsoft news. That was in January. It was a bit of an experiment really, an attempt to see how much Microsoft news there really is if it’s accumulated from a 2.5 months timespan. It was concluded from this two-week experiment that we will be better off covering just new types of stories and not seek more evidence justifying what was already demonstrated thoroughly over the years, it is simply not the ideal use of time.
In order to increase the signal in this site and also to decrease noise (off-topic discussions for example) which embodies repetition we are going to concentrate on the patent issue and also address other threats to software freedom, whoever the offender or victim may be. Despite the shift to multimedia (more audio and video soon). the number of pageviews increased a lot recently, which is an encouraging sign. The IRC channels too have been thriving, ensuring the long-term operation of the site (not just in maintenance mode). We are pleased to have people like Gordon on board. He helps edit some posts, We also have translators.
Wish us luck as we go back to signal. Have a great weekend, everyone! █
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* Uniqueness too. Other sites might prefer to just print every word from Torvalds’ mouth and merely repeat claims that were made in other articles. Here we are willing to acknowledge that software patents, for example, do not receive the backlash they deserve in the corporate press (which belongs to copyright maximalists and thus the same interests/status quo).
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