| Author | Comment |
Jayhawk
Dragoon
Posted: 2 Feb 2005
17:22 GMT
Total Posts: 80 | There's been a lot of speculation on what my future is with CG and what the site's future is after Barrett leaves. I'm going to be addressing this in the forthcoming newsletter that should be sent in a matter of hours. For those of you reading this forum, you get a sneak peek into what's going out in the newsletter and some information on the exciting future of CG.
The feature story for this month is a piece (well, several pieces) about free software and licenses. It may sound boring, but there's a lot of interesting things to be said about the topic. We have interviews on the subject with two top programmers in the community and there's a lot of interesting and intriguing points to be made. We're going to also include a "question of the month" along with some miscellaneous content. And the message you're reading here will be distributed in the newsletter as well.
About my job, I'm making a move to do something rather unique with the news editor job. It wasn't my original plan, but now that I've decided on it, I may as well let everyone know.
It's unfortunate that the largest sites are dominated by a very small group of people that in no way represent the community as a whole. Most of us are programmers, we live in the United States, and we're guys. Let's be honest, that just doesn't represent the community. It's a lot of newbies, gamers, and people who just want to add something without actually taking the time to learn how to program and write a game. Unfortunately, that segment (which makes up most of the community) really isn't welcome to participate in producing the very best TI sites.
The big sites are very stagnant. That is to say, there's no innovation, there's not a lot of new ideas being pursued, and it's very difficult if not impossible to get hired by one if you haven't made a name for yourself already.
Also, the biggest sites are really glorified portals. They host archives, link to files, and post brief summaries of news. Most sites aren't creating content. They're just distributing content created by other people.
I've done a lot of talking with the CG staff and with some people who have an interest in seeing CG succeed. We've decided it's time to tear down a lot of those barriers and make CG the best calculator site there is. Our plans are to innovate and to reach out to the entire community instead of to a small fraction of it.
There's room for innovation in many parts of the site, but my job is the news, and in a larger scope creating some of this content. I've persuaded the administration here to hire people who are familiar with other languages to provide translations of portions of this site. There's a rather large and active segment of the community in France that gets overlooked and frowned upon so often by American sites. Our goal is to reach out to that part of the community along with many others who may be kept away by the language barrier.
Also, instead of hiring a single news editor, I'm looking to hire a staff of people to write for this site. It's more than just writing news; we're looking for people to write opinions, reviews, tutorials, informative articles, and anything else the community can think of. But we're not looking just to hire people who have impressive credentials and have worked for other sites in the past. We're looking for ordinary users who want to be part of the best calculator site on the internet to apply for this job. While we can only hire a few, I'm I'm hoping to see a lot of applicants. Someone who is hired for this job will probably get my news editor job in a few months when I move on to other things. So there's a possibility to move up within CG by starting out writing content.
If you're interested, e-mail redux@calcgames.org and let me know that you're looking to become a part of a bigger and better CG.
I'll send this out in the newsletter, but this early preview is a bonus to our loyal readers of this forum.
Enjoy. |
JcCorp
Probe
Posted: 2 Feb 2005
17:55 GMT
Total Posts:
Edit | >Also, the biggest sites are really glorified portals.
I've noticed that too. This site isn't too bad with this, since a good portion of the staff is on the top downloaded author list. However, I haven't seen that much from anyone recently...
And I'm all for the barriers breaking down. :) |
darksideprogramming
Guardian
Posted: 2 Feb 2005
18:02 GMT
Total Posts: 1005 | Any military members on the staff yet? |
korkow
Ultralisk
Posted: 2 Feb 2005
18:11 GMT
Total Posts: 465 | The only reason I ever go to Ticalc is just to download programs that are not on CG, so I see what you are saying. |
BCTurk
Marine
Posted: 2 Feb 2005
20:51 GMT
Total Posts: 26 | Same here Korkor.
I think that many people who would be considered "newbs" or not programmers, but simply "gamers" are more or less afraid to post because of the prevelence of programmers, and they may think that the forum is for programmers, and the archive is for gamers. Most of us programmers are also the ones who post activly in other communities. I think we need some way of getting "newbs" and "gamers" to post. There is so many more of them then there are us. Think about high schoolers. Almost all of them have a TI of some sort. Now, not all go online, but alot do. I know that some of those who don't don't because they just don't think that there are calculator sites. Anyways, we need a way to involve the "newbs" and "gamers". I'll be working on ideas. |
Ray Kremer
Ultralisk
Posted: 3 Feb 2005
08:58 GMT
Total Posts: 310 | >Also, the biggest sites are really glorified portals. They host
>archives, link to files, and post brief summaries of news.
Basically ticalc.org and the also-rans. As far as that goes, I don't mind it. Somebody has to do the archive thing, it may as well be ticalc.org. Archives of games is no doubt the thing in largest demand. The thing in second most demand as far as I can tell, is help with using the calculator to do math homework. |
Morgan
Ultralisk
Posted: 3 Feb 2005
10:41 GMT
Total Posts: 321 | This is just my opinion, but I don't want to see anyone I am fond of making any negative remarks about ticalc.org. Without knowing what goes on on the inside...none of you have any freaking clue! |
TI Freak
Probe
Posted: 3 Feb 2005
10:46 GMT
Total Posts:
Edit | LOL, I understand M. My only complaint with them now is the length of time to get a file uploaded. But then, that has almost always been a complaint by everyone... |
Jayhawk
Dragoon
Posted: 3 Feb 2005
20:33 GMT
Total Posts: 80 | A bit of news:
The newsletter's a bit farther behind than I'd hoped. This is due just to putting a lot of text into an easy to read and nicely formatted style. Messing with plain text files can be a tedious task. :)
I've talked to a few people about the jobs we have available. I'll be talking to several more. Hopefully we have the hirings done in a couple of weeks and work on other stuff. I can't talk about it right now, but I just sent some pretty big news out to the internal staff e-mail.
If you've got any ideas or thoughts on stuff we should be working on, please post them. I'd like to see where the community thinks we should go with this project. |
