Please submit more Linux and Open Source stories

– by Robin Miller –
NewsForge is well on its way to becoming “the” online place to publicize Linux or Open Source-related news items, tutorials, opinions, announcements, even press releases. Our readership has grown far faster than we expected when we opened in July. More than 100,000 people now see selected NewsForge headlines every day, and the number of other sites that carry our free newsfeed is growing rapidly enough that we hope to double that figure within another few months.
If you have written an article about any aspect of Linux, *BSD or Open Source — or if you spot an interesting one that someone else has written — we want to link to it. Our long-term goal is to create the world’s most complete and up-to-date Open Source news index. We like to think we’re doing a pretty good job, but we are not perfect. We need your help.

There are plenty of smaller Open Source-oriented sites out there that we don’t know about yet. When you run across one of them (or if you start one yourself), please use our submissions page to tell us about it. We happily run “new site” announcements, and we are now actively reviewing relevant sites weekly. And if you find (or start) a site that consistently runs Open Source news, we’ll not only announce it (and possibly review it) but add it to our spider list so that, in the future, we automatically link to almost every appropriate article published on that site.

You are free to submit items under your own name, under your NewsForge user name (create an account here) or anonymously. That’s up to you.

The only thing we ask is that if you want to write an original story for NewsForge, you send an inquiry directly to editors@newsforge.com instead of through our submissions page, preferably before you start writing. This way you will avoid duplicating stories we may already be working on. And who knows? We might even pay you a newspaper-competitive fee for your work — assuming it’s not PR or an opinion but actual reporting, with verifiable sources, on a topic we believe will interest our readers.

We are now entering the second phase of NewsForge growth. We have the basic machinery and software working well, and we have a fine crew of staff editors in place. It’s time for us to open our doors to more contributions from the rest of the world.

And, as always, if you don’t have a story or link to contribute but want to comment on one we’ve already run, or share your opinion about NewsForge (or anything else) with NewsForge readers and editors, our discussion page is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays.