Slashdot Mirror
LinuxWorld.com, UnixInsider To Close
A couple people noticed that NewsForge has a story running on the closure of LinuxWorld and UnixInsider, two of IDG's online efforts. Some of the efforts will live on in the parent ITWorld, but it's too bad to see them go.
Too many companies took too little time to research the pros and cons when coming on the Internet with site after site after site, of content based commercialized houses that who knows what they housed. (sounds odd but made sense when I thought about it)
Well take a look around at whats going down, do the math if you will before you post on with some rant which you understand nothing of. Lets go with "Benefit of the doubt Mathematics 101"
hosting for site colo, per month 10k
writers, content people, etc., lets say 10 employees 10k
hardware 2 Sun e450's, 10 VAR501's 60k
Promotion 600,000.00
Just for a small company, thats about 30k a month. Now look at the revenues these sites generated with "click me banners". Maybe 3000 here 4000 there, which means most companies lost on these schemes as we all no.
Its simple to sit back, watch and poke around and make fun at FuckedCompany.com, but the overabundance of these sites which flourished in the late 90's are what saturated the markets with overhyped products, sites, dreams and hopes.
For those who keep up with financial info, you would know NASDAQ is taking a beating left and right and things will continue as more investors become aware of the true facts: The world is not ready to be run solely on the Internet.
Us geeks could dream, wish, hope, ponder, attempt to make it a reality but when it all comes down on paper take a quick look... There is no paper when dealing with the net its all a big risk, something investors are not going to sit back and watch eat up their money without making a profit.
Companies should seriously start revamping their business models and turn conservative for a period of time and hope this wave dies out (which isn't likely for some time now).
This is sad news but should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Use my bandwidth till I'm on FuckedCompany.com... enjoy
I have never been to the summer one in Silicon Valley but there is a winter one in New York and it ROCKS!
This company that just went udner rents the javitis convention center for the expo and aranges the activities. Everyone including Eric Raymond to Alan Cox, to even Linus Trivolds attends these expo's. Even Rob Malda and Timothy from slashdot have there own booth complete with a rug, couch, bean bags, and a giant telivsion screen with slashdot on it, and annoying acccording music played by rob personally.
In other words THE EXPO'S ROCK!! Also I got lots and lots of free software. IBM db2, SCO unix ( shudder), ximian cd's, etc. I feel a strong community sense when I am there and IT journalists and analizers get more hyped up about LInux after they attend these expo's. I beleive the expo's have contributed to Linux's success after the years because journalists bring more hype about it and that brings in more users
I will be very sad without an expo this year. Is there anythinge can do?
Also it is rumoured that Microsoft bought %10 of the company that hosts the comidex under the condition that they ban Linux from the mainshow room and move it to somewhere else in the Las Vegas. Is this true?
Oh well, perhaps Redhat, IBM, and one with a few other vendors can form a non profit group to organzie them.
http://saveie6.com/
This makes me sad and sick. Linuxworld was one of the few sites that had Contributing Authors who held some name recognition and clout in my eyes. (Nick & Joe). I had been reading their stuff in the print mags that end up in my in-box at work for the last few years --- and I had followed them and was very anxious to see every new article authored by them at Linuxworld.
The bigger picture I guess would be what happens to sites like
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I enjoyed the first few months of LinuxWorld but honestly I can't say I'm surprised to see it go. Joe Barr is better suited to be a perpetual +1 Slashdot poster than a journalist, Nicholas Petreley sounds like a flack for Caldera and their message boards were generally deserted except for Mr. Barr picking flame wars with anyone who crossed his path.
I think the bottom line is that The Linux Revolution is over. Now it's just about people using it, improving it and making a living from it, without all the drooling hype.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Search LinuxToday for "eDirections", and you'll find an article that explains this magazine was entirely funded by MS, and is not a real magazine, in the normal sense. Just part of your MS OS tax dollars at work....
Excellent Points! Especially the part about Bob Metcalfe, I never thought I'd miss him, but I do.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
I lost all respect for InfoWorld when they reviewed the last version of OS/2 Warp Server with Buzzword-Compliant Subtitle (whatever). Since they were still bitter over the Product of the Year ballot-stuffing incident, they gave the review to a contributing editor from Windows NT magazine (no conflict of interest there), who proceded to flame the IBM product, based solely on his dislike of multi-colored tabs in the settings windows. No benchmarks, no feature comparisons, just a summary dismissal because the UI wasn't identical to NT4.
I seem to recall that it was only a few weeks later that Nick Petreley left his editorial position at InfoWorld, although he remained as a columnist, and latched onto LinuxWorld.com. Smart guy, that Nick. Any chance Andover can get him to displace Jon Katz around here?
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
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I liked the Unixinsider site. Sure, it was not as good for me as reading Sysadmin every week. However, these sites like Unixinsider and unixreview are great reading for the beginning and middle level admins wanting to read articles from peers.
A lot of people are saying but these sites are in my opinion aimed more at the professional working on the big *nixes and the loss of this content is no good sign for the leagues of people working in environments that have not adopted BSD or linux on a complete scale.
ACK
I've notice this too. I commute in from Boulder Creek (up highway 17 at Bear Creek road to 880 north to near the San Jose airport), and I've noticed that traffic has been getting a LOT better. Of course, with Intel "attritioning" thousands and Cisco doing the same, things can only get better!
- Twid
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
I never read UNIXinsider, but I definitely read LinuxWorld. They were an excellent portal. I especially enjoyed the writings of Nick Petreley, Joe Barr, and Colin Mattoon. I think they did a marvelous job of extolling the benefits as well as exposing the warts of Linux. They weren't afraid to voice controversial ideas and in fact encouraged critical discussion of those ideas.
I'm going to miss reading their work, because while I agree that they will provide some nice "round-out" content for ITworld, I'm afraid that no one will ever see it. The ITworld front page has got to be one of the most cluttered ones I've ever seen. I think if anything they suffer from too much content, for my taste.
Just my $0.02
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Funny, but there still will be Linuxworld conventions. What's closing is the crappy "magazine" that no one paid any attention to anyway.
This August's Linuxworld in San Francisco will be pretty interesting. Last year they decided to move the convention from the San Jose Convention Center to Moskone in SF, which is bigger. Are they going to have to do some fancy footwork to make a two-thirds empty Moskone look good after all the Linux companies scale down and/or pull out of the conference?
No more linuxworld conventions further prove my traffic theory. The lighter traffic on 680 is a combination of engineers being fired by the ten thousands, conventions terminating, and companies folding in.
Then when engineers start committing suicide the traffic gets heavier because they jump on the freeways.
Isn't this just part of the death of online advertiser supported content? The disappearance of such web sites is occurring in every field from gaming to writer's resources and beyond.
Given nobody has made subscription based content work, it looks like the web is going back to its roots with hobbyist-only content. The only problem with that is, if a site is any good, there'll be tens of thousands reading it, in which case the hobbyist goes bankrupt supplying bandwidth. At least in the old days, there just weren't that many people to serve.
Of course, we'll always have corporate sites, but it kind of diminishes the joy of the web. After all, not that many people are fascinated by the world's largest shopping mall.
That's unfortunate. But in all honesty, are we gonna miss YAP (Yet Another Portal) anyway?
What's surprising is that these two sites are from different ends of the OS spectrum - one is about Linux, the other about Solaris. Showing us that no one is safe right now.
I'd just as soon see less "fluff" portal sites and see more meat-and-potato content-filled sites anyway. Portals are getting old.
It couldn't have happened to a worse company. IDG deserves the bad fortune they've brought on themselves as a result of being such dicks to anyone who uses such trademarks as "the color yellow" or the word "dummies". Here's hoping to Chapter 11 for IDG.
---
seumas.com
I was at New York 2000 and it was great fun. BSD girls, mmmmmmm.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Is this the same IDG that got so sue-happy over anyone using the phrase, "For Dummies", even if it was just a parody?
I enjoyed LinuxWorld in particular, and will miss it. But this isn't particularly surprising, given the state of affairs at IDG.
The InfoWorld weekly just isn't what it used to be; Bob Metcalf's departure left a void (and I never thought I'd think that, let alone say it). They're getting more reader comments in response to smacks at religion than they are at insightful pieces on the industry.
IDG Books...er, Hungry Minds, is publishing Cliff's Notes and the computer equivalent...books for people who don't wanna know nothin'. Their logo change (to a flying pig, I kid you not) is beyond explanation.
Sure, Tim O'Reilly is a windbag, but at least his company has carved out a niche and mostly has the respect of its readers.
What's left of Bill Ziff's company is still churning out the typical combination of advertiser suck-up, bombast, and pertinent information.
MaximumLinux is gone, but its current incarnation is, in my opinion, better than ever.
The bottom line is that old-school publishing rules don't work well in the Internet space. I don't want to read advertising online. I worked for one of these publishers for years in the 90's, and I know how often people griped about the number of pages of advertising vs. editorial. Nothing has changed there, except that now the recipients are paying for the ad space in connection time.
Like the Linux kernel, Linux media sources that get their energy and input from people who are interested will continue to thrive. Those that follow a business plan co-opted from last decade's print media are doomed.
I guess I came to bury LinuxWorld.com, not to praise it. But I did like it while it lived.