Mi 5 cents as former journalist and creator of several online magazines, all of them closed now...

Creating a new online magazine is something really cool. Thanks to the publishing tools available nowadays getting started is quite easy, and if the topic is interesting is not that difficult to find contributors willing to give a hand working on the layout and posting stories.

But that's not the difficult part.

In most cases such initiatives have a very hard time going beyond the first months, and most of them close before accomplishing a first year, with plenty of energies and excitement just burnt out. Two years later they have left no trace.

Nowadays there is even a higher degree of complexity since the own concept of periodical news and even "news" is in crisis. If you check your preferred online sources, I bet most of them are a continuous flow. Feeds and microblogging are making this flow even more continuous having different sources of more and more fragmented stories: a link to a webpage or a video, to a mailing list or forum post, to a simple 140 character tweet.

So... why not investing these energies improving maemo.org/news instead? It's all about publishing stories, putting the microblog thing in place and feeding the most interesting Maemo sources and updates, isn't it?

I know this is much more boring and demanding that starting something new from scratch. It will require more patience from the starters since they will need to agree things with the admins and the current "establishment". However, I firmly believe such energies will be better invested, they will have a direct impact in readers interested in Maemo and all the hard work will be clearly reflected in a better maemo.org in few months, and after several years.