GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

* The News Exchange is a news gathering area of the site where readers can submit stories, and also vote on stories they think are the most important. It's something you can check all day or subscribe to via RSS and read all the news stories of interest to trans people in one place.
* Stories with the highest votes will move up to the "Top" pages, like "Top Today", "Top This Week" and "Top This Month", guaranteeing that they will be seen by more people.
* It's like a newspaper where the front-page stories are decided upon by the readers' votes.
* Unlike the forum, which is transwomen-only, the News Exchange page is open to the public, so everyone interested in trans news and issues can read, submit and vote on stories.
* The News Exchange scans the net daily for stories of interest to trans people, using a specialized set of search algorithms we've developed, but these auto-gathered stories are not 100% relevant all the time, so we do have to trim away inappropriate results.
* The best stories come from real live women like you, who are more aware and plugged into your local news.
* It's really easy to use. You just go to http://www.genderlife.com/news (or click the News Exchange tab at the top of every page on this site) and click the word "VOTE" next to stories you like. If you register, you can submit new stories of your own, and people will then read and vote on your stories!
* "Published" stories are stories with a certain number of votes (they only need one vote for now).
* "Other News" are stories with zero votes. Giving them a vote will move them to the "Published" section.
* "Top Today" are the most popular stories -- the ones with the most votes.
* It uses modified open source software modeled on digg.com. Many websites like Yahoo and others are using this kind of "community created and voted" content to make a place where the most relevant, interesting content is available to the public. Who better to choose and share the stories important to us, than us?
* We think it could really take off as something interesting and valuable as it grows and more people submit stories, and vote important stories to the top so that everyone reads them.
* We have installed a thing that pulls published stories into the forum as posts here in the News Exchange Discussion forum so that they'll be here for us to discuss in the forum among ourselves. People who register for the News Exchange can leave comments on stories there in the News Exchange, too. The difference is that in the forum, it will be "just us" talking about the stories. In the News Exchange, everyone can join in discussions of news items: transwomen, men, FTMs, spouses, friends, supporters, etc.
* Someday I'd like to integrate the two even further, so that your forum membership carries over into the News Exchange automatically, but that programming task is a bit staggering for my paltry brain right now. =)