All fair, but: it's not a "news org." News is a business model, and, man, my business is feeding my family; this site's a passion project, fulfilling a need based on what I did back in the mid-2000s: curating stuff that developers roughly adjacent to my skills (i.e., JVM-adjacent) would find interesting. What happened, where, who, why, maybe how.
The site's actually not the main focus - the site's still being developed. The hardest thing about TheServerSide back in the day wasn't the writing or curating - although curation is hard if you're not just echoing press releases or READMEs - it was discovery.
Slashdot, freshmeat, RSS, IRC back then... all just being watched and participated in (I'm an actual developer first, after all) - talking to and with and watching ALL THE SOURCES. I had an OPML to die for, man! ... and I had to read it all, and filter it all, and ignore it when people talked about stuff that readers wouldn't care about.
So BCN's actually an infobot that happens to feed that discovery, in part - it's actually an information stream that yields factoids (infobot, woo!) and other services around that, and part of that yield is information about what's happening, so it HAS an RSS reader, it has github webhooks, it has everything I can think of as input streams, not as a comb filter but just as an information hub that can contain comb filters.
Yeah, there's no marketing; I'm no marketer. Don't want to be. And the presentation of the model is confusing, because I'm no marketer and because the readers don't and really shouldn't care, if it works. And the site's "in process" anyway - I mean, yeesh, it only has 50 posts so far! I'm working on getting there.
And "dreamreal" is a person - it's me. That's the IRC handle I've used for years, and that's actually one of the admin identities for me the bot had first, and it stuck. Easy to change, but honestly, it's not about me and shouldn't be.
But you're not wrong in the slightest.
ETA: it hit me after I wrote this comment that I was posting it under a name derived from my real name, to defend the use of "dreamreal" on the site to someone who posted THEIR OWN comment under "nonameiguess" - which would be an odd name to have in real life. :D
The site's actually not the main focus - the site's still being developed. The hardest thing about TheServerSide back in the day wasn't the writing or curating - although curation is hard if you're not just echoing press releases or READMEs - it was discovery.
Slashdot, freshmeat, RSS, IRC back then... all just being watched and participated in (I'm an actual developer first, after all) - talking to and with and watching ALL THE SOURCES. I had an OPML to die for, man! ... and I had to read it all, and filter it all, and ignore it when people talked about stuff that readers wouldn't care about.
So BCN's actually an infobot that happens to feed that discovery, in part - it's actually an information stream that yields factoids (infobot, woo!) and other services around that, and part of that yield is information about what's happening, so it HAS an RSS reader, it has github webhooks, it has everything I can think of as input streams, not as a comb filter but just as an information hub that can contain comb filters.
Yeah, there's no marketing; I'm no marketer. Don't want to be. And the presentation of the model is confusing, because I'm no marketer and because the readers don't and really shouldn't care, if it works. And the site's "in process" anyway - I mean, yeesh, it only has 50 posts so far! I'm working on getting there.
And "dreamreal" is a person - it's me. That's the IRC handle I've used for years, and that's actually one of the admin identities for me the bot had first, and it stuck. Easy to change, but honestly, it's not about me and shouldn't be.
But you're not wrong in the slightest.
ETA: it hit me after I wrote this comment that I was posting it under a name derived from my real name, to defend the use of "dreamreal" on the site to someone who posted THEIR OWN comment under "nonameiguess" - which would be an odd name to have in real life. :D