OSNews

Sigh.

You do realise that I have been accused of bias in favour of and against every company, project, and piece of software known to man, right? This was old four years ago, and it's even older now.

The only thing I'm biased for is BeOS. Everything else is just shit. Playing the "he's biased!"-card, as a small group of people here tend to do every other day, is the equivalent of throwing your hands in the air and saying "I have no more arguments, so let's just accuse him of bias and get a high-five from the other three guys with whom I agree! Yeah! That'll teach him! Now all we have to do is pretend us four guys comprise the entire readership of OSNews and it'll be just like we are the majority!"

Which proves it must be true!

And even if you're not you do seem to have that aura, at least I and 3 others (apparently) are able to see it.

But never mind that, the gist of the idea was to change the format to present articles with extra (very small) opinions from different angles in order to offer more food for thought, make it a less one-man show and be different from other sites.

If you want to stand out or at least be unique in some way in a huge pool of blogs/news sites I think you can do so by providing added value by utilizing insightful opinions. For me personally most value of this site, right now, is found in the comments sections. Most news articles are already "old" for me, having appeared in my RSS reader earlier in the day, but it's interesting to read what other humanoids make of it.

If a news article is presented not only with your clever thoughts, but also from others of who the readers knows where they stand it would provide a situation in which commenters are better able to write something interesting. I think this is so because now we only have your opinion and a number of people don't like it, come up with their own, but often these are not well researched or motivated. When other angles are already presented it would make it easier for the commenter to evaluate them and write their own thoughts.

Sometimes trying not to appear biased is counter productive, because it forces you to otherwise alter your judgment for the sake of a semblance of fairness.

I think if you believe in something strongly, then by all means, defend it. There's also nothing wrong with vigorous debate, and many here, myself included get wrapped up in the "You're biased" "No you're biased" finger pointing and dismissiveness that makes discussions cease to be productive.

That's the nature of these things though, they exist everywhere where contentious issues are discussed by a decently sized number of people.

I wish the people who think I shill for Microsoft would follow my twitter account sometime, where the actual people that shill for Microsoft argue with me because I criticize them regularly.