Last week was a good week for news. We had the stunning revelation of the Windows Phone 7 operating system and the revelation of the ballot screens for both Windows (all current versions) and Office 2010. But there was also another story doing the rounds about memory usage in Windows 7.
I didn’t comment on this story as I knew that Windows was not “maxing out memory at 86%” and slowing performance but rather was doing what it had been designed to do, cache the programs you run the most to increase performance instead, while making that memory free at any time should you need it for something else.
Robert B wrote this up for us here, highlighting this important point and setting the facts straight shortly after the story first broke.
This whole sad episode, which began on IDG News has been written up by technology journalist Paul Thurrott here. This does raise an important point about what we write and who we’re writing it for.
The type of people who read technology news websites, such as Windows 7 News, can be assumed to be technology buffs and enthusiasts right? Wrong. The nature of the internet means that all of what you write is there available to everybody all of the time.
Lets take the Windows Browser Ballot screen as an example. This will affect up to 1 billion people across Europe, the vast majority of who will be completely non-technical. It’ll appear unexpectedly and without a proper explanation of what’s happening and why. A great many of those people, hundreds of thousands, will want to know more about it and so at some point will do an internet search. That’s where the tech news sites come in, and that’s why we write a lot of the stuff we do in the way we present it.
Anybody can do news and anybody can do comment, but checking the veracity of those news stories, and making sure the news and articles are as accessible as possible to the widest audience, remember Windows is used by over 3 billion people worldwide, always has to be at the foremost of our minds.
Last week I received a comment about one of the articles I had written, on the subject of the Office 2010 file-format ballot screen that simply said…
This site used to be about news…
Now it looks like editors personal blogs…
We don’t care what you think. We want facts, not opinions!
It’s important that news and articles are backed up with opinion, reasons and background to contextualise them for the reading masses. A great many people will not know what the repercussions of something for them personally will be, and as such look to journalists and experts to help put things into a more personal context for them. This also helps to make sure that anyone who picks up news stories we break here on Windows7News know that we’ve checked the facts of a story before we publish it, helping to prevent things like the recent memory usage debacle.
So continue with Windows7News, we’ll always bring you the best and most relevant news, opinions and features and as for the rest… You can check their facts back here 
