news.opensuse is online

news.opensuse.org, an OpenSuse dedicated news portal went online these days.

Stephan Binner created the news portal together with Robert Lihm as one of his hackweek projects.

The idea is to have one central place for OpenSuse related news. The news are presented as articles with an open comment section at a central place – which is different from planets where you don’t have a central place for everything, and also different from some blogs where you have no comment section.
Also, the news can be rated giving every news author some feedback from the readers.

I’m curious if the concept will work out – writing article like news require some discipline and is more difficult than for example writing blog posts.
Also, of course there must be something to display. Without a roughly constant flow of news such projects are doomed.

In comparison, Fedora has the unofficial (?) FedoraNews.org, but in these days it mainly publishes the links to the Fedora Weekly News Issues (FWN). It also has a story section (which I used in former times several times to publish my howtos) and a blog section, but they are not that often used today. Plus, the blog section is probably superseded by Planet Fedora.
But that’s ok, because that’s enough: FWN covers all important topics like major bugs, major changes and developments and also major discussions while the planet covers the at least bit more personal side of the project. There are simply not so many more news someone could report about – not to mention the man power you need to write them.

Other OSS projects like KDE however do have their own news page and use it frequently to publish the newest information. The same is true for the Gnome news page.

So its hard to say if the project idea will work out or not. I hope that it develops into a platform which keeps me informed about everything OpenSuse related without subscribing to the planet.