The purpose of the News team is to publish news regarding Squeak development and use. It aims to provide a service to the Squeak community, highlighting anything which the Squeak users may find interesting in The Weekly Squeak newszine. It will also try to promote Squeak outside its own community, by submitting articles and news items to mainstream websites such as Slashdot and OSNews.
October has been the first month during which we were fully operational. The Weekly Squeak blog ( http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com ) is now getting more than 400 views per day, with a peak of slightly more than 1500. The RSS2 feed gets ~50 reads per day. The increase in viewers is due to the greater number of articles posted to the blog, and to the fact that a couple of articles have appeared on reddit.com . Also, we're starting getting referrals from sites such as lambda-the-ultimate.org and redhanded.hobix.com, that have a greater audience.
Michael Haupt has joined the News team after a call for help on the beginners mailing list. Michael is responsible for the weekly summaries that get sent to the lists every monday.
http://news.squeak.org now redirects to the blog.
Most important open issues: 1. We still can't manage to get at least one post per day. But we're improving. 2. There's some stuff (post editing/deletion after publication, comment moderation) for which we should define some policies.
The actions scheduled for October were: 1. Try to add one or two posts to the blog everyday. 50% completed. 2. Resume production of weekly summaries to be sent to the mailing list(s). 100% completed. 3. Try to find some more contributors, and start tracking more mailing lists. 100% completed.
Actions scheduled for November: 1. Post at least one item per day. 2. Add more mailing list (Squeakland and Croquet maybe?) 3. Improve integration with the main squeak.org site.
Long term actions: 1. start producing articles to be sent to mainstream news sites. 2. move the blog to news.squeak.org maybe? 3. Guest bloggers?
The News team has a mailing list (news at lists.squeakfoundation.org, subscribe at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news ). Everyone can subscribe to the list, even if just for lurking, but new team members are always welcome ;)
Giovanni