New website launched: LINGNEWS.NET

Hello everyone -- I'm back!

No, I will not be resuming bloggery at ilani ilani, but I have something much more exciting to announce! Ever since I got hooked on digg.com for my tech news, I've been thinking about how handy it would be to have a similar community-based repository for linguistics-related news & links. Now that the semester is over (and I graduated, yay!) I finally have the time to devote to getting such a project off the ground. So, I am very happy to announce...

http://www.lingnews.net - LingNews! Now live and ready to rock!

For those of you who have not used this type of site before, the basic premise is that contributors (that's YOU!) submit stories and vote for the stories they think are interesting. The front page of the site contains a constantly-updated list of the top 10 stories as decided by reader votes. To view & vote for recently submitted stories that have not yet made it to the front page, head to the 'Pligg for stories' page, accessible from the sidebar. You can also comment on any story and rate others' comments. Additionally, for those of you who like RSS feeds, there are tons of them.

Here are some basic directions for how to add stories:

• First, if you want to contribute, go to the site and create a user account (you'll need one to submit stories, but not to read them).
• When you come across a cool linguistic story, go to lingnews.net and submit the link along with a brief description using the 'Submit a story' button on the sidebar. Alternatively, you can bookmark this link, which will allow you to submit a link directly from the page. Be sure you aren't creating a duplicate story, though - search LingNews first!
  
• Each story can only go into one basic category. Right now there are categories for animal [communication] & [language] evolution, general linguistics, historical, morphology, phonology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax. (Not all of them are showing up yet because they're empty, but you can submit to them.) If you think the site could use another category, by all means let me know. Although only one primary category can be used, you may tag the story with as many descriptive tags as you like.

I hope LingNews.net becomes a useful resource for the linguistics community! In the near future (i.e., as soon as the app is actually released), I would also like to add BlogBridge Library functionality, which will create a directory for linguistic blogs.

Well, we'll see how it goes! Please check out the site and start submitting stories! Also, if you have a blog (or even just a mouth), a little publicity couldn't hurt! ;-)

Thanks, everybody, and see you on LingNews!
-Bridget