Information technology (IT) news will be the main content in an online news portal to be launched by The Sun daily later this year.

The website, SunCities.Net, will be a news-based community portal which will act as a platform for ordinary Malaysians to share their thoughts and views, its editor Oon Yeoh told malaysiakini today.

"If there's any niche we are carving for ourselves, it's in IT," added Oon.

He said that this new site will play a complementary role to the many existing news websites.

"We see ourselves as playing a complementary role to websites such as malaysiakini . After all, we won't exactly be competing head to head," said Oon.

He said that the site will be launched in March this year and for the meantime, the daily has started a temporary website, [#1] TheSundaily.com[/#] , for its readers to get used to the daily's news portal.

Launched on Monday, [#1] TheSundaily.com[/#] reproduces news from its print edition and is updated at noon daily.

Oon said that the current website contains no interactive elements and is a "no-frills" website.

"This site is only 30 percent of what SunCities.Net is going to be, which will contain more subjects, including in-depth news analysis," he said.

He added that unlike malaysiakini which strongly focuses on politics, [#1] TheSundaily.com[/#] site is more of a general one with a "good mix of general, business and sports news" and will provide a platform for IT news.

"Innovative online media companies like malaysiakini has proven that while Internet penetration rate in Malaysia is still low, there are quite a lot of Malaysians who turn to the Internet to get their news," he said.

He said that if The Sun 's website is able to generate a traffic load comparable to malaysiakini 's, he would then consider that to be an accomplishment.

Initial problems

Oon added that there are no mechanisms to gauge the number of visitors the newly launched site has attracted thus far.

"We have no accurate tracking device. We will be able to do that with our proper site once it is launched. This present site is only there to be a stop-gap measure for our readers," he said.

He, however, said that the temporary site did face some initial problems caused by the change of servers from US to Malaysia.

"In the first two days, our readers complained that they could not open the page. But the problem has been overcome now."