OSNews

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OSNews is a computing news site with a focus on operating systems and their related technologies that launched in 1997. The content is managed by a group of editors and the owner. The managing editor of OSNews is Thom Holwerda (joined in 2005). David Adams is the owner who also contributes regularly. Eugenia Loli-Queru, the former editor-in-chief of OSNews, resigned in June 2005. She has now taken on a more passive role, as senior editor. Adam Scheinberg is responsible for maintaining the site's code and was largely responsible for the version 3 rewrite of the site (version 2 was written by Eugenia in August 2001 when she resurrected the site after long periods of inactivity).

Except its dedicated WAP site, the main OSNews site is written using the http://www.MoBits.com mobile-browser autodetection engine, which autodetects more than 150 mobile, embedded and text-mode browsers and serves them automatically lighter, ad-free C-HTML pages. OSNews was the first site on the net to achieve this in 2003 and it is the main reason why some mobile HTML-capable browser developer companies like Openwave and Opera are usually using OSNews.com to test or demonstrate their mobile browsers.

The editors contribute news items and manage the submissions of news bits, articles, editorial comments and reviews that are submitted by readers, in addition to writing original articles. OSNews serves daily 275,000 page views on average (statistics from Oct 2005).

Like other technology news sites such as Slashdot, it has a free user/subscription model, and allows viewers to add commentary to articles. Recently, OSNews published version 3 of the website, which includes an all-new commenting engine. Instead of reporting comments to moderators, this system now relies on votes. Readers can vote comments up or down, and readers can set a score threshold, which can eliminate the down-voted comments from view. Thanks to this system, OSNews has managed to make the experience of reading comments better. Many readers have emailed OSNews editors to thank them for keeping the level of discourse higher than the average on internet message boards. Whereas OSNews originally had a very strong following from BeOS users, under the new peer moderation system it has now become a place for hot debates between pro and anti-microsoft advocates.

On Feburary 12th, 2007, OSNews' managing editor Thom Holwerda published the 1.0 verson of the OSNews Style Guide ^[1]. This style guide is licensed under a Creative Commons license so that other websites and/or publications can use and adapt the guide to their liking. OSNews is one of the few of its kind with such a style guide.

OSNews also maintains some offshoot sites: Dusty-Computing, New Mobile Computing and GnomeFiles (a GNOME and GTK+ software repository).