Xconomy’s Social Interaction Enables Boston Tech News Discussion

Xconomy, a Cambridge based business and technology news site launched in May of this year. Xconomy has several staff writers and in addition a large number of leading experts in business and technology who contribute articles. Focused on the business of technology, the site aims to report on the latest news in the New England tech economy. Plans for the future include setting up similar site for other regions.

Writers include Nathan Myhrvold who was once CTO of Microsoft, he is now CEO and founder of the venture firm, Intellectual Ventures.

The site is certainly one you should consider putting in your RSS feeds if you are involved in the tech industry in New England. Though I would like to see more conversational posts. Sometimes I thought I was reading the Boston business journal or Mass High Tech. Robert Buderi's article on Carl Icahn of Genzyme is a good illustration of this type of news update article.

One interesting feature I found was the archives page, each article was listed with the writer's name, date of publication, whether the article was written by an Xconmy staff writer, and if any comments had been made. This last column, the comments column was helpful in enabling me to easily review the level of interaction between the writers and readers on the site. I looked down the list of articles and their comments since May of this year when the publication launched to find out which articles had comments. Many of the articles do not have comments, but some do and one article had 134 comments.

Rebecca Zacks has written a series of articles about Sermo, the company provides an online social networking website for physicians. The article that received 134 comments was about Sermo's recent security breach. Some hackers had broken into the site and posted information about how to gain access to Sermo if you are not an MD on other blogs. Rebecca's post was excellent because she featured other blog posts in her original article and she engaged people on the comment section of her article. Rebecca followed up with some additional articles about the security situation at Sermo. I enjoyed reading the original article and the comment section.

I also thought the search features on the archives were very good, it was easy to find all of the article related to Sermo for instance, but I would recommend to the designers of the site to provide the visitor with the ability to click on articles by month.

Here’s a list of the writers on Xconomy:

John Abele
Noubar Afeyan
Howard Anderson
Bill Aulet
Abigail Barrow
Joost Bonsen
Alexis Borisy
Rodney Brooks
Joe Chung
George Church
Jim Collins
Chris Gabrieli
James Geshwiler
Anita Goel
Linda Griffith
William “Trip” Hawkins
Rebecca Henderson
Marc Hodosh
Charles J. Johnson
Dean Kamen
John B. Landry
Robert Langer
Willy Lensch
Pattie Maes
Victor McElheny
Ken Morse
Frank Moss
Richard Mulligan
Nathan Myhrvold
Vinit Nijhawan
Carmichael Roberts
Kenan Sahin
John Santini
Michael Schrage
Phillip Sharp
Linda Stone
William C. Taylor
Charles M. Vest
George Whitesides
Daphne Zohar
Ken Zolot