What is SiliconNews, and why should you care? - FastSilicon.com

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What is SiliconNews, and why should you care?

Since we launched SiliconNews.net, we've been very careful to monitor people's impressions both good and bad, and to think our way through many of the issues presented to us. Since this project started out as a personal mission between us to make a site we'd want to use ourselves, the core focus of SiliconNews.net is clearly based on this core concept of ours. In order for everyone to understand our intentions and where we expect this to go, we felt it necessary to do an article, explaining what exactly we're doing and why.

Q). Why did we start SiliconNews?

A). We wanted to dig up the top enthusiast news of the day without visiting 20 or 100 websites every day to do it. RSS has been around for a long time now and makes this rather easy, but we've yet to find an RSS client that we truly like. We realized other people felt like they were in the same boat, so we decided to make this a web experience. Almost every PC on earth connected to the Internet has this thing called a web browser. It's the most widely accepted interface to information that currently exists, and it's the one people are the most comfortable with. Using the web to do this removes the hassle from the end user when actually trying to use RSS to keep abreast of the news.

Q). I'm a webmaster, why should I care? Why should I let you aggregate our feed.

A). Overall our experience with webmasters has been very positive. Webmasters "get it", and realize there are positive benefits to us utilizing RSS in this unique fashion. What are they?

-Search Engine Optimization. Many websites are not very SEO, or Search Engine Optimized. Since we *are* largely SEO compliant, our headlines of website news are easily spidered by search engines and *ALL* of our headlines directly link to the source website.

-We cache news for 15 days. We felt anything longer than this would be redundant. Why does this matter? What if readers missed a story you posted simply because they were distracted that day reading someone else's news? Our site is fully indexed and keyword searchable, so if you posted an ATI 1950XTX review that some people missed, if they do a keyword search on our site, they will find it along with other reviews of the same thing. This allows more information in front of the end user, and encourages them to READ EVEN MORE.

-Not every end user knows about every enthusiast website. If they've never visited your site, it could possibly be simply because they did not know you existed. When they browse the categories at SiliconNews, or search the News Index, they may just discover you, and add you to their list of resources.

-We support nine languages for translation, courtesy of Google Translate. A user picks his language, the web page becomes translated, and when the user clicks through to your site, your site is also translated in real time. This isn't a perfect process as translation software only goes so far. Still, this opens up a lot of potential to non English speakers to actually see your website and understand it in their native language. Since the translation works relatively transparently, we plan on beginning to offer non English language websites in our News Index as well, as many of these can be translated into English with the click of a mouse.

-Through our encouragement of users to send news, comments, and feed requests to us, we end up finding some real gem websites even we didn't know about. Not only that, but our Top Stories section is also based on a mix of what's popular and what users suggest to us. We try to put at least one top story on the front page every single day, and this is done based on merit, and user suggestions which we encourage.

-We're going to implement category specific polls soon, where end users vote for their favorite sites, and we will use this criteria to promote sites to the front page. In other words, your users, because they really like what you do, will be telling us who they think is the best. This encourages participation in our site of course, but it also encourages your fans to get up and toot your horn.

Q). I'm an end user. Why should I care? Why not use Firefox bookmarks or RSS reader software?

A). We hope that you see things as we do, and see SiliconNews.net as a way to get more pertinent information in front of you in a meaningful manner. Not only that, but in a familiar setting (i.e. your web browser).

-It's one less piece of software to run, and we can put in front of you A LOT MORE INFORMATION than you can get from simple RSS bookmarking.

-If you have specific news that you want to see on our portal we encourage you to simply tell us. The SUBMIT NEWS, SUGGEST A NEWS FEED, and SUGGESTIONS menu items on the left are there for you, and we encourage you to use them. These sections send mail directly to the webmaster and we do read and respond to queries. We take our users seriously, and we want to learn how to make the site better and better. That requires being humble enough to LISTEN. We want to listen.

-We have a local commenting system for news items, and a forum system for Top Stories, so if you feel like elaborating on an item, this is encouraged. Not all websites do these things with their content, so we try to provide a sounding board for your opinions.

In every way we are trying to be responsive as well as responsible. We've already made significant changes to the website in just the first week, and it's all been based on feedback from YOU. Going forward this is a process we will continue as SiliconNews.net evolves and truly becomes "All Your News, In One Place"

Enjoy,

Nigel Woodford and Scott Piercy

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