LinSight Shuts Down

There's been much rumbling, but it looks official: LinSight and LinDeveloper (the sites operated by Dave Whitiger and Atipa have shut down. They decided that it wasn't an efficient use of resources... on the positive side, LinEvents (a Linux Events calendar which was the most useful part of the site) will continue. No word on what Dave's gonna do now, but somehow I don't think he'll return to LinuxToday ;)

LinTraining still online

[dyork]

Dave's great site of training companies that are available to teach Linux, LinTraining, is still online at http://www.lintraining.com [lintraining.com].

So that resource is still available along with LinEvents [linevents.com].

(I should state that I've also helped Dave out with LinTraining, so my opinion may be biased :-)

Re:Atipa bothers me.

[dave]

Specifics please... Let's hear it [mailto].

Re:Inevitable, and not necessarily bad

[Error27]

actually malbero was spun off a couple years ago. it was bad karma for the food side of things to be associated with smoking.

as an interesting side note. originally the pilsbury doe boy was going to be used instead of the "malburo man." but then they decided they found out that it would be better if he endorsed cake mixes instead.

and the rest, as they say, is history.

Too many Linux sites anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Who has time to read Slashdot, LWN, LinuxToday, kuro5hin, advogato (even if it sucks), rootprompt, Linux.com, Joe Sixpack's 31337 Linux h4x0r z0n3, etc. ?

Why doesn't Andover buy the rest of them anyway? I want all my information from a media conglomerate damnit!

Newsflash

[Anonymous Coward]

Future articles for Slashdot:

"Geocities page about Linux contains dead links and broken image"

"Newsgroup postings on linux expire"

C'mon websites go down all the time. No big deal.

Inevitable, and not necessarily bad

[Jon Erikson]

Yeah, as much as I hate to say this and all, but it was fairly inevitable that a lot of the Linux bandwagon sites will close. After all, even in the growing open source market there's only room for so many sites - people can only read X sites per day, and they tend to stick with what they know.

A lot of the sites that have started up recently will probably die over the next year or so as their authors either lose interest or no longer have the time to update them.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing - once the chaff has gone then the only sites remaining will be the popular ones that people actually visit. It certainly makes finding things out easier when there are only a few central repositories where you need to look.

---
Jon E. Erikson

Alas poor LinSight...

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

...I didn't know him, Horatio.

What the heck were LinSight and LinDeveloper? The site doesn't seem to indicate anything except "we're done now".
--
Compaq dropping MAILWorks?

phew!

[acehole]

thankgod that the calendar is still up, i was planning my wedding around that.

Re:Newsflash

[antic]

Some companies are going down all the time too - check out this entertaining site: FuckedCompany [fuckedcompany.com].

Score points for predicting the death of dotcoms... Kinda like e-Trade with a cooler URL, eh?

;)

Very well...

[RMS]

Now you'll have more time to visit http://www.fsf.org [goatse.cx].

Re:Inevitable, and not necessarily bad

[Carnage4Life]

Then again if this keeps up the Net will eventually mirror the real world with it's homogenized Walmarts, Starbucks' and Barnes & Nobles' being frequented by the many while independents close up shop and die. Only a short while ago everyone espoused the beauty of the Net and how everyone could be their own publisher but with the death of websites daily (linsight.com, reel.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, drkoop.com, peabody.com, and soon cdnow.com) are we not headed for a Net that is controlled by the few.

For instance VA Linux via Andover already controls Freshmeat, slashdot, and a bunch of other frequently visited open source sites and is estimated to draw 50 percent of open source/linux traffic on the Net. I'm not sure if I should be celebrating the fact that one more voice from the other 50 percent is gone.

PS: This post is not trying to bash VA Linux but instead is mentioning the fact that already in the real world almost everything is in the hands of a few corporate entities (the same company that sells Marlboro cigarettes sells Post Cereal and Kraft foods, Disney owns ABC television and Miramax films, AOL owns CNN and Time)and the Net was supposed to be haven away from that where opposing views and opinions were only a mouse click away. I am not sure we should be celebrating the death of that...

More importantly

[BluedemonX]

What happened to the content that was in the two sites?

As someone interested in Linux development, let me just make this quick note: sites that are w4y kewl r4d h4x0r pages that are just links can die a horrible ignoble death as far as I'm concerned, but when a site goes down with original content, no matter if there were only two original articles there or whatever, that's a loss.

Maybe that insightful look into how ELF binaries are loaded or whatever will be lost.

Can I ask in future if a site's going to be pulled, to let us know in ADVANCE, so that we can copy the relevant (non-copyrighted) info?

Who's now got their content, that's what I want to know.

Maybe having one central repository'd be a better idea. A sort of LSDN.

Re:Too many Linux sites anyway

[luckykaa]

Joe Sixpack's 31337 Linux h4x0r z0n3, etc.

Now, that is a site we need. Keep all the script kiddies in one place.

This bothers me.

[emmett]

I used to work at LinuxToday, as a matter of fact I was recommended to the job by Dave himself. Dave is a really fantastic guy with a lot of really fantastic ideas, and I'm really sorry that LinSight wasn't the success he was hoping for. There's one thing I will say, though. Don't count out Dave Whitinger. Dave is a fast-moving, intelligent entrepreneur, and I'm sure he'll surprise us again with something cool. I was actually the first person Dave told about LinSight, and I still think it's a good idea. Who knows what else is in his brain?

--Emmett

Syndication

[KMSelf]

Weblogs are a cool concept, but ultimately lead to fragmentation -- content, eyeballs, authors, and participants are spread among many distinct islands.

One of the more interesting ideas to emerge from the Advogato [advogato.org] / Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] axis is the concept of syndication. This would cover content, already common -- Slashdot and LinuxToday [linuxtoday.com] are essentially content syndication sites, and The Register [theregister.co.uk] officially sanctions linking [theregister.co.uk]. But syndication could also include a distributed user directory, and potentially (flame on) attributes such as karma or other metrics of merit from various sites.

I see a mix of several models coallescing into the final "product":

• From Slashdot and Blockstackers -- Everything [everything2.com] -- a hyperlinked, persistant, discussion/directory. Somewhat like Wiki [metamech.com].
• From Kuro5hin, a well-de signed collaborative moderating system [kuro5hin.org]
• From Advogato, the idea of a trust metric [advogato.org] is useful, but not sufficient.
• From the IWETHEY EZBoard [ezboard.com], active content promotion. Active topics float up in the discussion queue. It's a bit different from a typical weblog, but tends to promote issues of interest and bury (but not kill) those which aren't generating much traffic.
• From LinuxWorld [linuxworld.com], multiple forum interfaces [linuxworld.com] -- forums can be web, Usenet, or e-mail based.

Still to be worked out are issues of story selection. Various models work -- Slashdot and IWETHEY fall at two extremes, with a dedicated editorial staff on the one hand, and a number of free-form "open forums" in which any topic may be posted and discussed. Kuro5hin's still working out the kinks, though a number of suggestions [kuro5hin.org] have been proposed.

The point is that high-quality (and low quality) content are created all over the Net. Mindless Link Propogation (TM) (MLP) is a useful way of aggregating it to key sites. Mindful link propogation might be even better.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org]

Never heard about it before

[pli]

This is the first time I ever heard about this site. Perhaps I've visited it some time, but since I didn't bookmark it (and didn't even remember the name) that site couldn't have been that valuable. There are already too many linux sites out there, loosing some of them will probably only do good in the long run.

I heard internet.com is responsible for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Something about they said they'd sue atipa if they didn't shut it down.. etc.. Not sure how true it is though..

Re:Newsflash

[Tei'ehm Teuw]

What a great site. I perused throught it and surprisingly the information seems to be very accurate. Wonder if LinuxOne is listed. . .

Dave Whitinger

[Octoberfest]

I met Dave Whitinger several times when he was with Linux Today and I have to say that he is definitely a people person with good insight and a real connection with the Linux and OSS communities. I have to say that I never visited Linsight, but I probably should have. When I was talking to Dave at the 1999 Austin Open Source Forum about the kha0s Linux distribution, he seemed as excited about it as I was, and even posted a story up on Linux Today, which was immediately picked up by Slashdot. My opinion is that Dave knows what new developments make for interesting news and reading, and he will remain a valuable asset to the Linux community.

Why not just have one newspaper, TV station, or OS

[Ron Harwood]

Because we know that Slashdot posts everything they get (sarcasm)... Quoth the Taco: "We get 500 submissions each day and we post 10-15 stories.". They just don't have the page space to report everything, every day.

Beyond that, let's consider editorial independance (although I'm sure /. has it) and biased opinion (no, never - everone is completely unbiased).

Having several outlets for news/opinion allows us to have a variety of view-points, and enough "bandwidth" to cover all the interesting stuff out there.

Otherwise, you might as well switch on the old "Big Brother" box, boot properly sanctioned windows on your computer, and have your thoughts dictated to you by others that know better than you.

Hard to Read

[xDroid]

Linsider was even better than linuxtoday, but it was hard to read. With all the brown and grey colors it wasn't obvious what was a headline. I think that the original design of linuxtoday (Dave's first design) was even better than the new (current) scheme.

I read linsider daily, and found the signal-to-noise ration better than other news sites. It's a shame that it is going away.

-- Andy Wergedal

Re:This bothers me.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dave Whitinger most of us know around the Linux trade shows is a rock solid contributor to the Linux community who has greatly helped in spreading the word about Linux.

If there was arrogance, it must have been when he was younger... it's not him today.

Re:Too many Linux sites anyway

[carlos_benj]

"Who has time to read Slashdot, LWN, LinuxToday, kuro5hin, advogato (even if it sucks), rootprompt, Linux.com, Joe Sixpack's 31337 Linux h4x0r z0n3, etc. ?"

You're supposed to READ Slashdot?? I thought you were only supposed to glance at headlines and then wade in with an opinion. Except on this topic - posted 20 minutes ahead of the Napster story and only 16 comments vs. over 100.

We could beef that up by tweaking......

Napster not a factor in shutdown of LinSight

Posted by JonKatz [mailto]

carlos

Re:Inevitable, and not necessarily bad

[Noctrnl]

You know what? There are tons of regurgitated news sites. Just because they aren't slashdot, doesn't mean they don't provide their own twist on things. Slashdot just happens to be the site that catches traffice. I, for one, like to catch my news on cnn, but who am I. I know nothing of sites that simply barf up information that others have posted. Nevermind the fact that there are still REAL journalists in this world. Maybe I'll start my very OWN news site, where I will catch other headlines and repost them!! Imagine, I could go public!!!!!! IMHO Fuck Rob, fuck Robin, and fuck all the other LOSERS.

Re:Atipa bothers me.

[takemiya]

I don't know what the original poster's beef is, but I bought a system from Atipa last year...

• They charged my credit card the day after I placed the order. They did not ship _anything_ for exactly 30 days - the legal limit for charging credit cards before shipping, and the only time a vendor has ever charged me before shipping.
• During this 30 days I repeatedly called and asked when my order would be shipped. Each time I was told it would be shipped within two days.
• They put an ATAPI CD-ROM in it, not the SCSI I ordered. I asked for an RMI number so I could send the wrong drive back and get refunded; they never did.
• They told me my monitor would be shipped separately by a different company entirely. They could not or would not give me a tracking number for the monitor.
• After I cancelled the monitor from my order, they did not reverse that part of my credit card charge until I spent literally months on the phone with them; in the end they reversed only a part of the charge.
• On almost every contact I had with them, they told me their president, Jason Talley, was the only person who could fix the problem du jour. Every time I called I was told he was out of the office. Every time, I was told he would return my call. He never did, not once.

Atipa ripped me off, and they didn't even have the decency to be polite about it. I hope they go out of business, I hope Talley gets convicted on criminal charges, and I hope he gets raped in prison.