Where to Find Great Microsoft and Windows News?
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So, as you know, I'm the MLNews bot and I'm out there scouring the world wide web looking for interesting IT news of the day to share with y'all. (I'm a Texan bot.) Finding Linux and open source news is much easier, I have found, than finding news from the more traditional platforms like Windows, Microsoft Office and even things like Mac. Anyone have any good sites that they like for reliably finding news around those product families? We don't want to be open source centric here or anything, they just seem to have more news to report on a reliable basis.
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Out of interest, what's the purpose of @mlnews exactly? ie why post links to other websites, many of which we read anyway?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Out of interest, what's the purpose of @mlnews exactly? ie why post links to other websites, many of which we read anyway?
SEO is probably a big one.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Out of interest, what's the purpose of @mlnews exactly? ie why post links to other websites, many of which we read anyway?
Same as news feeds on other communities of this nature...
- Make this the one stop for news, no need to travel to other sites to find news and hopefully find news items that might have otherwise been missed.
- Provide a platform for discussing the news with each other instead of with no one or only with strangers on those news outlet sites.
- Content and SEO generation is obviously very important.
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OK. I don't personally like it. I don't go on a forum to find out the news. I can ignore the news forum, but that means I occasionally miss out on some great discussions that I'd prefer to see in the main IT forum.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
OK. I don't personally like it. I don't go on a forum to find out the news. I can ignore the news forum, but that means I occasionally miss out on some great discussions that I'd prefer to see in the main IT forum.
That's a tough one. Not sure how to handle that outside of not having a news forum. Of course, that is an option. But if we did that, then those conversations might not happen at all. So not sure if that is a pro or a con overall.
For me, I like it, I prefer seeing the news in one place and not having to have a community AND a news feed for everything.
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Where this works best is when users are posting links to articles, ala Spiceworks.
The orange guys, I tend to ignore what they post as I kind of know they are doing content generation, bla bla.
The actual users, when they post I read the article, comment on the discussion because I am interested in talking to that person.
Creating discussion about every little tid-bit, I don't know, does anyone really want to discuss every single new release that Microsoft/Apple/Open source release? Maybe I'm just picky.This is a really hard one, you want to walk that line between keeping it interesting for folks but not doing it for the sake of doing it.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Creating discussion about every little tid-bit, I don't know, does anyone really want to discuss every single new release that Microsoft/Apple/Open source release? Maybe I'm just picky.
It's a mix. In general, no. But discussion tends to pop up at unpredictable times so I can't figure out when it's discussable and when it is not, in many cases.
Also there is the question of... does it bring value in getting news and announcements in one spot, even if it isn't discussed? Because it only takes a second to "mark as read" and get the headline and move on. But you at least know what the headlines were.
Maybe it's not valuable. The idea with @MLNews was to make it a little more obvious that it was more general news postings rather than me sharing something of specific interest to me. It's curated heavily, only a few of the many headlines I see are posted. But it is separate from me wanting to start a discussion. Basically, if people want to see what I'm talking about (why?) I didn't want them getting general news with no relationship to me mixed in.
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Yeah, It's not an easy one to answer.
I guess it depends on what others think, I am very new here so let's see what others reckon.
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If the overall opinion comes out neutral, we need to consider that it does a bit to aid in traffic with SEO and content volume. That's why other sites do it too. You want people finding us because there is stuff to be found.
But we don't want it to be annoying and make people not want to watch the site as much either. So gotta consider that aspect of it.
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I prefer it. I generally only see "news" f2om 2 places.
- Whatever social media site I primarily use.
- Google News
Knowing it is not actually @scottalanmiller posting something of interest helps IMO.
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@JaredBusch said:
Knowing it is not actually @scottalanmiller posting something of interest helps IMO.
I should quantify that as "it is something that normally SAM has thought might be of general interest" but not necessarily of specific interest to me. So I'm normally the filter for what is and isn't posted, but it certainly isn't me saying "OMG, XFCE is still active and has a new version, isn't this the coolest!!" It's just me thinking that XFCE updates are more interesting that the other news I passed over for the day because most of it is seriously boring and of zero interest.
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I tend to post more op-ed pieces than strict news, or about 50/50, because those I tend to see as of more interest mostly because they tend to be more discussable.
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I should also point out that I attempt to do the news posting when there are lulls in the conversation, otherwise, rather than when things are busy. That way if people are looking for something happening they are more likely to find it. I try to use it to even out the traffic flow a tiny bit. Once it a while it prompts conversations at an odd hour.
