InfoQ Turns One Year Old!

Posted by Floyd Marinescu on Jun 08, 2007

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InfoQ

InfoQ officially launched exactly one year ago today, and what a year it has been!   Our mission is to be the world's source for tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community; with content at the level of depth and focus needed for team leads, architects and project managers.  In keeping with that mission InfoQ has published:

• 1350 original news items
• 124 in-depth technical articles
• 80 video interviews and video conference presentations
• 9 original free-downloadable books

Our growth has been phenomenal with over 135,000 unique visitors per month as of May. We successful ran our QCon conference in London this March (see show coverage and key lessons learned), and have launched a Chinese edition of InfoQ.

It has been a great first year, and definitely the first of many. Upcoming additions include more great content + a new community on architecture, we will be bringing QCon to San Francisco Nov 6-9 (to be announced), and InfoQ Japan will be launching this summer, and we will continue to innovate with the features of the site (yes and with search too). :)

Thanks to the community at large and especially the blogosphere for all the announcements of our content - our super fast growth of membership was all word-of-mouth driven. And thanks especially to our editorial team of  ongoing in-the-field practitioners:  Jonathan Allen (lead .NET editor), Sebastien Auvray, Kurt Christensen,  James Cox, Scott Delap (lead Java editor), Amr Elssamadisy, Deborah Hartmann (lead Agile editor), Obie Fernandez (lead Ruby editor), Ben Hughes, James Kao, Mark Little, Werner Schuster, Rob Thornton, Stefan Tilkov (lead SOA editor), James Vastbinder, Hartmut Wilms, and Geoffrey Wiseman.    We are always looking to add to our editorial team, feel free to email us if you'd like to join!   Thanks also to InfoQ's awesome full time staff Diana Plesa, Roxanne Beverstein, Jason Lai, and Kevin Huo, and especially the dev team led by Alexandru Popescu including Cristi Buta, and Mihai Ganea.

For the readers, here are the top 12 content items on InfoQ from the previous 12 months, measured by traffic:

#1 Spring 2.0: What's New and Why it Matters (article, Jan 15, 2007)
#2 A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails (article, Jun 13, 2006)
#3 How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters (presentation, Nov 21, 2006)
#4 The Role of the Enterprise Service Bus (presentation, Oct 23, 2006)
#5 Migrating to Struts 2 - Part II (article, Oct 18, 2006)
#6 Introduction to Domain Specific Languages (presentation, Oct 31, 2006)
#7 Introduction to JBoss Seam (article, Dec 18, 2006)
#8 From Java to Ruby: Risk (article, Aug 31, 2006)
#9 Integrating Java Content Repository and Spring (article, Mar 12, 2007)
#10 Introduction to BackgrounDRb (article, Jun 27, 2006)
#11 David H. Hansson on the Future of Rails (interview, Nov 14, 2006)
#12 Casestudy: Brasilian National Healthcare System (article, May 12, 2006)

Thanks everyone!  Let us know what other areas you'd like us to cover or feel free to provide any other feedback!

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   InfoQ Turns One Year Old!

   by Corby Page

   Content has been tremendous on this site. Opportunities for improvement:
   
   1) Content is more in-depth than the 'other' sites, but it takes longer to generate. Turnaround time can be better. Waiting a few extra hours for journalistic research on breaking stories is great, but when it takes a couple of days the story starts to feel a little stale.
   
   2) Need a more active community. It's nice to be in a place without the Rolf Tolleruds, but quite frankly those types of people are the cost of having a lot of people participating in active discussions.
   
   3) Take a few more risks. Remember how TSS used to do a bunch of stupid crap like playing cards and rewards for user reviews and begging people to send in funny cartoons? Yeah, most of that stuff didn't work out, but it was entertaining and kept things moving. It tended to drive up user involvement.

   Reply

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   Re: InfoQ Turns One Year Old!

   by Floyd Marinescu

   Thanks Corby. There is definitely always more 'stupid crap' to try out. :)
   

   It's nice to be in a place without the Rolf Tolleruds, but quite frankly those types of people are the cost of having a lot of people participating in active discussions.

   
   Actually I think that in many cases (at least early on TSS' life) they were the catalyst, and later after people go used to participating the momentum kind of just carried on.
   
   The discussions will come. TSS didn't get any regular meaningful discussions going on until near the middle of its third year, so we're on our way. :)

   Reply

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   Congrats!!

   by anjan bacchu

   Hi There,
   
   I like your "AJAX"ian approach to building this site. Sometime back, on TSS, there was an article describing how TSS was built. Is it too early for the same on InfoQ ?
   
   More community participation would certainly help. But there are other communities today(IBM developerworks, java.net, javablogs) than existed for TSS during the early days and there are lot many blogs which consume user/dev. time than just these portals. So, the growth of InfoQ cannot be expected to grow like TSS. I still wish that InfoQ grows and enriches the community.
   
   BR,
   ~A

   Reply

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   Good job

   by Alexandre Poitras

   Congratz guys! InfoQ is awesome. The quality of its article is by far the best in the community. Continue your great work. I enjoy reading the articles. It's nice to see a web site caring about the content quality instead of posting 3 times a day about another framework getting released.

   Reply

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   Congratulations

   by Alexey Verkhovsky

   InfoQ has been around for just one year? Really?!! This is amazing. Great job, guys.

   Reply

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   Congratulations

   by Ray Krueger

   InfoQ is definitely one of the must useful sites out there right now. A constant stream of really good content.
   
   So thank you, and congratulations.

   Reply

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   Re: InfoQ Turns One Year Old!

   by Geoffrey Wiseman

   Yes, the balance between good, detailed coverage at the cost of time (potentially feeling 'stale') and rapid coverage that lacks depth is a hard balance. I personally lean towards the former, because in the era of newsreaders and rss feeds, the basic facts of the news have a tendency to spread with or without sites like InfoQ, but good detailed commentary that assembles more than the base facts can be difficult to find consistently.
   
   That said, it's good to get feedback on which side people feel we're erring in that balance.

   Reply

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   Congrats!

   by Dan Diephouse

   I thoroughly enjoy InfoQ. Keep up the great work!

   Reply

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   Congratulations!!! Felicidades!!!

   by Roberto Carlos Gonzalez Flores

   A year really?, It's been so fast.
   Nice job.
   
   As they would say in my country:
   Felicidades.

   Reply

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    Re: Congratulations!!! Felicidades!!!

    by Rafael de F. Ferreira

    A year really?, It's been so fast.
    Nice job.
    
    As they would say in my country:
    Felicidades.

    
    
    I'm not sure if we share a country, but we certainly share the sentiment. Congrats!

    Reply

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    Congratulations!

    by Alex Ruiz

    One year has passed so fast!
    
    InfoQ is awesome! Congrats on the excellent work! Really good (and excellent) content!
    
    InfoQ in Chinese...that is so cool! Any plans for InfoQ in Spanish?
    
    Cheers,
    -Alex.

    Reply

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    Congratulations

    by Toby Jee

    Congratulations to InfoQ and to Alex as well. :)
    
    As for the community activeness, I guess most people (me at least) visit InfoQ constantly and read the articles and comments but just didn't post anything.
    
    Cheers.

    Reply

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    Congratulations

    by 亮 徐

    InfoQ had done a great job. Let's enjoy InfoQ and InfoQ China now and InfoQ *** in the near future!
    
    Cheers.

    Reply

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    Congratulations

    by Gavin Siller

    InfoQ is the first site I bring up every morning when I get to the office. Always something new and interesting.
    
    Congratulations and keep up the outstanding work.
    
    PS: I second the request for a technical article describing how infoq.com was designed and built. (Including the pains and mistakes)
    
    Gavin

    Reply

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    good stuff

    by Stuart Charlton

    A great year, a great site. Keep it up, Floyd & team!

    Reply

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    Congrats Floyd and to the entire infocrew!

    by Sammy Larbi

    Congrats Floyd and to the entire infocrew!

    Reply

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    Re: InfoQ Turns One Year Old!

    by Bill Burke

    2) Need a more active community. It's nice to be in a place without the Rolf Tolleruds, but quite frankly those types of people are the cost of having a lot of people participating in active discussions.

    
    
    PLEASE NO! This is what I like about InfoQ.

    Reply

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    Re: Congratulations!

    by Floyd Marinescu

    Any plans for InfoQ in Spanish?

    Not at this time, but if a company came forth wanting to provide InfoQ in Spanish we would gladly facilitate it.

    Reply

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    Re: Congrats Floyd and to the entire infocrew!

    by Floyd Marinescu

    Thanks everyone. The most thanks should go to the editorial team and the entire staff for making this all possible, I am but one of many. :)

    Reply

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    Re: InfoQ Turns One Year Old!

    by Giridhar Pottepalem

    First time I came to know about this site was at the Spring Experience in Dec, 2006. Since then I have been a regular visitor. It is a very informative site. Enjoyed several video interviews and presentations posted.
    
    CONGRATULATIONS.

    Reply

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    Re: Info! Turns One Year Old!

    by Mike Keith

    Congratulations! You accomplished a great deal in one year, Floyd and Alex.
    
    I don't think the discussion part is all that necessary, really. What people want is a portal to find the kind of news and information that interests them, and InfoQ has done a great job at doing that. Good job by the contributors/editors Scott, Obie and Stefan (the ones that I read, at least)!

    Reply

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    Re: Congratulations

    by Alex Popescu

    I second the request for a technical article describing how infoq.com was designed and built. (Including the pains and mistakes)

    
    
    Last year I have given a couple of presentations at different conferences on this topic, so you may already find something online. Hopefully, I will get the time to start writing a detailed article. However, for the moment I am pretty sure I will not call it Lessons learnt, as I am learning something every day :-).
    
    ./alex
    --
    .w( the_mindstorm )p.
    ________________________
    Alexandru Popescu
    Senior Software Eng.
    InfoQ TechLead&CoFounder

    Reply

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    Re: Congrats Floyd and to the entire infocrew!

    by Alex Popescu

    While Floyd is thanking the whole crew -- and I am doing the same -- I would also like to thank our readers that send us feedback all the time. They helped me a lot making things right and improving every day. So, please keep them coming!
    
    ./alex
    --
    .w( the_mindstorm )p.
    ________________________
    Alexandru Popescu
    Senior Software Eng.
    InfoQ TechLead&CoFounder

    Reply

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    Congratulations InfoQ!

    by Keith Donald

    Congratulations Floyd, Alex, Scott, Diana, and crew! It's been great watching InfoQ grow over the last year. Keep up the excellent work!
    
    Keith

    Reply

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