Everyone and Their Brother Opens a Linux Site

Couple of new Linux Portals to mention: An anonymous reader sent us a link to LinuxStart- a yahoo-ish Linux focused site, and FaKe wrote in to send us JustLinux.com. EmilEifrem sent us Earthweb's newly announced OpenSourceIT, which isn't a portal: More like a better designed LinuxWorld, with a cheesier name. It Debuts with the standard ESR and RMS profiles. All of these sites look pretty decent- its pretty excellent that Linux can support this much content. Anyone else remember when it was just Me and Scoop? We've come a long way. Very cool.

Comments

Also..

[drwiii]

Also, coming sooner or later, linuxonline.org

The actual look of the site will probably be something like this.

:-)

okay, I'll type some more...

[TedC]

How does a not so witty one-liner like this recive a score of 3 when there are /. readers writting 3-4 paragraph posts that make a little more sense. Argh.

I can type some more, if you like. :-)

Running a Linux news page with about 50 readers may seem like a waste of time, but it's not. From August 31, 1998 through the end of February, 1999, I helped 3 Windows users get Linux installed and configured for the first time. I didn't know any of these people prior to them sending me email via a link on my page. So if the trend continues, I will have helped 6 people per year become new Linux users. I don't want to sound like I'm selling Amway, but if everyone did this we could drastically increase the size of the Linux user base in less than a year. Just a thought.

TedC

CmdrEgo?

[/dev/niall]

Anyone else remember when it was just Me and Scoop?

Cough. I don't think so:
Linux Gazzette
Linux Now!
Linux toybox
Uncounted BBSes before the 'net

... the list goes on. Credit where credit is due! ;)

Linuxstart

[Jesse E Tilly]

Actually, Linuxstart has been around since early March. What's really cool about it is that searches are multilingual (i.e. if it's a french page, you get the french page). Thus it makes it a bit more global (in my opinion, that is).

The problem now, is, what to do when searching for linux news?! I've got slashdot, linuxtoday, lwn, metalab, freshmeat, and now all these portals (well, Linuxstart carries Linuxtoday and Slashdot news...and Linuxtoday carries Freshmeat and Slashdot...and, well you get the idea). If any of them could reach the customization of Yahoo!, I'd be all over that...or better yet if Linuxtoday, Freshmeat, and Slashdot could become content providers to MyYahoo...oh the options the options.

Jesse

Why this won't work.

[BiGGO]

These businessman, regard linux users as a dumb crowd.
Some of us, are infect a dumb crowd,
using Linux just because of the hype.

but the most of don't need portals.
we know what we want to do.

These peope think: "hmmmm.... linux has 7 million reachable users, thats a good target, let's get them".
It won't work.
Portals are made for internet newbies, and these sites never thought that linux users arent such.

if a linux newbie is looking for info, he'll search the ldp.
if he wants news, he'll go to slashdot/linuxtoday.
want jokes? he'll go to segfault.
need files? freshmeat is the place. (not linuxberg)

the unix way is to spererate different services,
and that's what they don't understand.
(slashdot may be regarded as a portal to some people, but as a recent poll showed,
for most, it's just a news/discussion site)

on the future, though,
when there will be many "just-for-the-hype" newbies,
that come from windows, yahoo, tucows, and zdnet,
these portals will have audience.

also the saturation of the market with so many linux sites,
is not good for anyone.

on a different note,
there are many cool services in justlinux (the one i checked out).
such as email forwarding, dns for dynamic ip's (that's a rather good idea) and redirection.
too bad all of the domains end with a .com


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