On Singularity: A user-driven news and discussion portal
January 19th, 2008 –
From Waleed Abdulla:
OnSingularity.com is a community driven project that aims to make it easier to find news, blogs, and events that are of interest to the futurist community, and also to provide an outlet for writers and bloggers in the field to reach an audience quickly, and by doing so, encourage more contributions, discussions, and collaboration in the field. As users browse the Web and come across interesting articles, they can easily share them with the community by clicking a button on their browser toolbar (a bookmarklet) or by using the Google Reader plugin without leaving the page they’re on. The articles are listed on the site for other readers to read and vote on. The more votes an article gets, the longer it stays on the home page and the higher it moves up in the list. OnSingularity also facilitates questions and discussions where users can post a question to the community rather than an article, and have other users vote the question up and discuss it if it’s interesting to them.
OnSingularity limits its scope to subjects that interest the futurist community. For example, Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, transhumanism, accelerating change, and similar subjects. The narrow focus keeps the news interesting, and the discussions intelligent and informative. This model uses the news as a conversation starter to keep the community engaged, and it rewards those who participate intelligently by pushing their contributions to the top and giving them more visibility. It also encourages more bloggers to write because it provides an easy way for them to reach an audience.
How you can participate and help make this project more useful:
- Vote on the articles you like to see more of on the Web site. Your votes are critical to maintain a high standard of quality.
- Submit relevant articles and share with the community. Add the bookmarklet (or the Google Reader plugin) so you can submit quickly as you browse the Web.













Wow, thanks, Joshua…
Thanks Joshua. And, everyone, please let us know what we can do to make this even a better service.
This is a good idea!
I was also wondering if, in the future, it might help to create an SIAI presence within Second-Life. That could be interesting.
Great idea… I have some problems with the design though. Each article posting takes up so much space that I can only see 9 postings on my screen when I load the page (1280 x 1024).
I prefer the more economical layout of reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com, where I can scan the list of stories more quickly.