Regular OSAlert readers will notice we’ve had a drop-off in original articles over the past year or so. That’s something we’d like to change. We’d like to encourage OSAlert readers to submit articles by staging a contest wherein the best articles will be judged by OSAlert staff and readers, and the winners will receive valuable prizes. All submitted articles that meet our submission guidelines will be published at OSAlert. In addition to wanting articles to publish, this is also a talent search of sorts. We’re hoping to identify talented OSAlert readers to fill the ranks as editors and regular contributors. If you think you have the skills and desire to be a part of OSAlert, please enter the contest, or just contact us. Read more for details on the contest.
The contest officially begins today and will continue for 30-45 days, depending on how many submissions we receive. Submissions will be edited and published as soon as possible, with the goal of having one published each weekday. We’ll keep our readers posted about how many submissions we’ve received
The quantity of the prizes will vary, but will include a mix of cash value (i.e. Amazon Gift Certificate) and merchandise prizes. We hope that there are enough submissions to merit a total prize value of over $1000. We reserve the right to substitute prizes in the case of winners in countries where it’s too expensive to ship a heavy merchandise prize. We’re currently soliciting prize contributions, so if you work for a company that makes a product that would be of interest to OSAlert readers, contact us if you can donate one, and we’ll make sure it gets a lot of exposure when we announce the prizes.
Suggestions
The only type of article that we’d discourage participants from submitting is an opinion piece. Although we do publish opinion stories and editorials, we’re looking for substantive reporting, not rants. You are free to opinionate, but we’ll warn you that if your submission is just a rant, it’s likely to be rejected.
If you have an idea for a story, but you’re not sure whether we’d like it, let me give you some advice I wish someone else gave me when I started college: it’s not cheating to get the person who’s going to be judging your work to pre-judge it before the deadline. If you have an idea or a rough outline, send it in with the subject “contest entry outline” or “contest entry idea” and we’ll be happy to tell you whether we think it’s a good one, and even help you flesh out your idea. We’re all in this together!
The major categories of articles we publish are:
Reviews (software, hardware, book, etc)
In-depth news reporting (covering a release, event, or industry trend)
Interviews (with developers or company heads and spokespeople),
So review the latest version of your favorite OS or computing device. Or review the latest computing-related book you read. Been to an interesting trade show in the past couple of weeks? Let’s hear about it! Do you admire someone in the OS world? Send them an email and ask for an interview! Do you have some ideas on where computing is headed or where it is now? Flesh that out to feature-length!
We will be judging completely subjectively based on many factors, including: quality, depth, readability/clarity, grammar, and uniqueness. If the articles are worthwhile and different enough, we may accept similar stories, for example, two reviews of the same OS. We’ll also have at least one “people’s choice” prize, based on how may “recommend” votes it gets.
Rules
Here are some of the specifics:
- Your article must be written in English.
- We reserve the right to edit any submissions for clarity. If we feel the need to do major editing, we’ll get your approval first.
- The work must be original work written expressly for OSAlert. Articles previously published elsewhere, including your blog, are not eligible.
- Articles must be submitted to osnews-crew at osalert dot com and your subject line must contain the words “contest entry” (although more words are acceptable, or even preferable.)
- A complete list of contest winners will be available at the completion of the contest.
- Screenshots, photos, and other art are encouraged (JPG or PNG only, please) and may be bundled with your article into a ZIP file or a tarball (tgz, tar.gz). IF you must create thumbnails (required only if the original PNG/JPEG/GIF picture is more than 600 pixels wide), make sure that these thumbnails are in JPEG format and exactly 160 pixels wide.
- If you have any connection to a project that you’re writing an article about- you’re a developer or contributor, etc – that’s fine! In fact, it’s encouraged. No one has better insight into your project than you! Please disclose your relationship, however.
- Multiple submissions are allowed. You may submit as many articles as you want, and you are eligible to win multiple prizes. We’ll warn you that we’re unlikely to give all the prizes to one person, no matter how superior your writing is.
Please read the appropriate sections of our Style Guide (PDF Link) before submitting your work. Because we only accept entries in plain text with minimal HTML markup, we recommend using a text editor rather than a word processor, desktop publishing app, or WYSIWYG editor.
There are two stipulations that seem to contradict each other:
The only type of article that we’d discourage participants from submitting is an opinion piece.
and
So review the latest version of your favorite OS or computing device. Or review the latest computing-related book you read. Been to an interesting trade show in the past couple of weeks? Let’s hear about it! . . . Do you have some ideas on where computing is headed or where it is now? Flesh that out to feature-length!
Aren’t reviews and conjectures about the future of computing also opinion pieces?
Edited 2008-04-18 19:15 UTC
Opinion can either come from your mouth, or your rear.
In that sense, one can opinion about the future of computing in a constructive sense (attitude is the application of personality), or you can bitch, whine and complain.
Kroc summed it up pretty well. If you back up your thoughts and ideas with research, then it’s reporting. If you’re just pulling it out of your ass, then it’s an opinion piece. Some people can pull really good ideas out of their asses, though. That’s why I said I’d “discourage” opinion pieces, not that they wouldn’t be considered.
Nevertheless, you bring up a valid question, and thanks for giving me the chance to clarify.
Edited 2008-04-18 20:24 UTC
Yeah, but those usually stink…
Sorry, I couldn’t resist… I’ll fall back to serious-mode from now on.
may I guess, what the intention of the osnews guys is:
people should write more, and better articles, so that me will have more users and than the value of the osnews.com page will rise up.
The motto is: you do the work, and we make the money.
Perhaps this is an idication that the owner/owners of this page want to sell this page, but they want to rise its value before they go with a big bag full of money.
Please read the article! If you contribute a story, you will get high quality merchandise like key rings, ballpens, …
He’ll probably need to learn how to spell “possible” first, though.
Yup, you keep on believing that. Have fun.
Isn’t that the motto of most Open Source companies out there?
(except all of those who fail at the ‘make the money’ part)
Yeah well someone has to pay for my 58 room mansion, 12 cars, and our private company yet. Oh, and we own a island off the coast of Brazil.
I feel a door comic strip approaching…
This topic comes up with reasonable frequency. Have you thought about publishing some sort of financial statements? Nothing of GAAP quality required. Just some basic “we got this much from advertising, this much from subscriptions, and this much of it went for web hosting and bandwidth, this much went to something else, and we have a balance of $x.xx.
Hear, hear! Then we’d redistribute profits among users!
Can’t expect us to cater to stupidity.
I was thinking more along the lines of factoring this particular information out to a separate page that we can just link to when the topic comes up again. And you know that it will… repeatedly.
That said, I’m not sure I’d call it stupidity, out of hand.
Are you saying that the money from advertising and subscriptions exactly balances the expenses? If so, that’s quite remarkable. I’d have thought that they wouldn’t happen to be exactly equal. If you guys are supplementing OSAlert out of your own pockets, step forward and receive due credit. If OSAlert has a positive cashflow and staff are getting compensated for their work, be honest about it. Otherwise, it just makes it appear that you have something to hide. A simple periodic statement would avoid that whole issue.
Edited 2008-04-19 17:08 UTC
I don’t see why the state of the OSAlert books should be public knowledge? They are after all a privately held organization and their financial status should be their own business.
I did not say that they *should* be. I said that it might save some repetitive efforts by staff in the long run to simply publish the facts from time to time. Thom has repeatedly had to come out and say that OSAlert is an entirely volunteer effort and that no one gets paid. So it certainly does not sound like it would involve publishing sensitive information.
>If OSAlert has a positive cashflow and staff are getting
>compensated for their work, be honest about it.
We have been honest about it since 2001: NO editor on OSAlert was ever on a payroll. But there is a pricey server/hosting and an administrator who gets compensated to keep everything up and running.
True – there are plenty of people here who treat their own uninformed assumptions as sacrosanct, but that doesn’t give anyone else an obligation to disabuse people of those assumptions.
Some people would argue that asking for donations to a for-profit entity is pretty stupid.
If you’re “in the red”, post about it and I’m sure no one would have a problem donating original articles.
If you’re “in the black”, you should really be paying for original content like everyone else in the publishing world does.
So, you’re calling Adam, Eugenia, and myself stupid. We all donate our free time to OSAlert. I can only speak for myself, but I donate a few hours a day to OSAlert, besides my university study, job, and social life. I don’t ask anything in return for that because I enjoy doing it, and because the subject matter interests me. OSAlert allows me to learn more about computing and journalism – the two terms that will play a central role in my future.
The fact you read that what you call stupid is… Well, weird.
It doesn’t seem to bother the countless people who already submitted their originals this weekend – about 5 or 6.
Right here is as good a place as any to announce that we intend for this contest to be a recruitment tool to find writers that we hope we can bring on to do regular writing for OSAlert. And those people who we do bring on to do writing on an ongoing basis will be compensated at a rate in line with what web sites like OSAlert pay.
That being said…
People contribute content to web sites all day long without expecting compensation. How much do you get for recommending a site to digg? Digg wouldn’t exist if people didn’t do their work for them. How much do you expect to be paid for writing the comment you just wrote? The comments on OSAlert are a big part of our content. Making a call for submissions is not the same as asking for donations. OSAlert has never asked people to donate money. People who contribute their time and energy have done so in exchange for fame.
99% of the bloggers out there, if they make any money at all, don’t make enough to fairly compensate them for their time. Why do they do it? It’s gratifying to be able to have a say, and it feeds our spirits to know that other people are reading what we say. It’s a natural human desire. Small-time bloggers are often frustrated, though, because they know that their missives aren’t being widely read. They wish more people were reading, because then their blog would have more meaning.
People contribute to OSAlert because it allows them to have a prominent stage on which to showcase their talents. It’s like setting up a blog and having a hundred thousand people read it the next day. And it’s not just random people, but fellow OS enthusiasts. Do you want to be able to have your say? Submit something to OSAlert.
There are very few online news sites that make enough money from advertising that they can afford full-time writing staff. Thankfully, OSAlert does finally make enough money that it can afford to pay contributors of feature-length original articles. But still, I doubt anyone is going to be in it for the money. If you’re looking to strike it rich, I don’t recommend a career in writing for niche-oriented tech news websites. If you’re looking to be a big fish in a small pond, and get your voice heard, however, come on down!
Yes, that’s true.
And perhaps you are right, if you give “the others” the priority to be stupid.
Just out of curiosity… what do you think is the current value of this site (osnews.com). (let’s assume that you would like to sell it)
Not sure about today’s value. But back in 1999, I’d say maybe a billion dollars or so, assuming that the webservers run on Linux.
I don’t really care what the motives of OSNEws are. If people submitting their own original content cuts down on the amount of *buntu related non-news and predictable flame bait articles that get posted here far too frequently then I’ll be elated and may even participate.
30hrs 44 minutes
…since Sbergman27 had an original thought…
I think this competition is flawed, in that what you are asking for is too broad; not in allowed topics, but content-structure.
It’s like asking everybody to go away and choose their favourite thing ever, and at the end see which one is best. There’s no “best”, it’s all a general sort of mish-mash.
You need to have one thing consistent between the entries so that some metric of quality can be judged. I would say that there should be a three point outline, or a limit on the number of words (something between one to three thousand) or some unifying quality between entries.
I can see your point. However, to extend your analogy, I’d say that this is like a “pick your favorite thing ever” contest wherein we will judge it on a common standard, for example, usefulness or beauty.
We’ll be judging these articles on a pretty simple (though certainly subjective) set of criteria: interestingness, quality of research, appropriateness or topicality with the OSAlert mission, and overall technical quality of the writing. A longer article may gain points for research, but if it’s too rambling, it will lose points for interestingness or writing quality.
Last time we did a contest we restricted the topic a bit more. I wanted to give people a freer hand this time. We’ll see how it turns out.
Who owns the copyright of articles submitted?
Are multiple entries allowed?
Edited 2008-04-22 01:24 UTC
All articles, newsbits, and comments published at OSAlert are automatically copyrighted by OSAlert, which happens automatically whenever something is published, by US law. However, our agreement with submitters is that they may republish their articles elsewhere (their own blogs, for example) after 30 days. You may also release your articles under creative commons after 30 days if you wish.
Multiple entries are allowed. Thanks for asking. I’ll update the original announcement to say so.