Out with the old and in with the news

The time has come to kill off DSstar, according to Thomas Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications Inc. The online news publication that, for nine years, has specialized in data intensive storage solutions has finally run its course.

Tabor confessed to harboring fond feelings for the project in which he has been so closely involved for so long. But, ever since the early years when he published on BBS systems by means of Telnet clients, he's known when it is time to move on. And the numbers, he said, speak for themselves. There is precious little brand recognition to be lost by terminating the title. And, for what it's worth, the field might as well just be surrendered to the competition.

DSstar's functions can be logically devolved into sister publications HPCwire and Grid Today. And TCI's director of publishing operations, Peter Meade, has decided to use the opportunity to reorganize the group's editorial staff, opting for a "zoned defense" model that will allow a more flexible response to future challenges.

To assist in facing those challenges, the group is actively recruiting an associate editor, or a managing editor, who will spend more time managing than editing if Tabor has anything to do with it. He told one short-listed candidate that the ratio should be something like 90:10 with the lion's share spent managing input from the many contributing editors bring great technical expertise to the online publications.

If the high-performance computing community may be visualized as horizontal in aspect, the variety of significant applications for high-performance computing should be seen as towering vertical elements such as the bio/pharm industry, the U.S. military, the auto industry etc. And it wouldn't be reasonable or economic to expect in-house talent to produce news copy, from any of those beats, at a level that would satisfy TCI's highly advanced readership.

This is what makes the stable of contributing editors, each a Yoda in his or her field, such an essential counterbalance to the routine daily crop of product stories that editorial staffers have to generate every morning from rewritten press releases.

There is a plan to update and open up the format of the TCI sites to include a blog-style home page for each contributing editor. The page will include a flattering photo of the contributor and will link to an archive of previously published features with facilities for readers to post feedback.

Tabor expects the contributing editors to regard their TCI blogs as public repositories of their professional reputations. It is anticipated that contributors' egos will drive them to send in new material for their blogs if they start to feel the debate has moved on since they last published anything significant on a given topic. And of course the format will allow the publications' informed readership to post their own commentary beneath each piece, further fuelling a healthy culture of debate.

The overall effect of this is intended to resemble a portal to the communities of high performance computing and the global grid community. The editorial calendar will, nevertheless, tend to be seasonal as industries manage their big news releases around the calendar of the more significant trade shows. For this reason, TCI's new hire had better not have any objection to traveling around the country and manning the occasional conference booth.

The presence of TCI editors at the International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking and Storage (SC/05) is mandatory. This year it will be held at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in Seattle, where the keynote speaker will be Microsoft's Bill Gates. Tabor expects to field a team of eight staffers at the event from Nov. 12 through 14. Copy filed "live" from the convention center will be given prominence on the TCI sites during that period, even if some of it is actually canned in advance.

Tabor suggested that the Seattle jaunt would be a testing ground for the new hire. But, to an itinerant Brit who has spent the last six years editing small newspapers in San Diego County, it just looks like another community. [See "The Global Village" at http://byronik.com/thesis.html.]