On Twitter (was Re: [LINK] Microsoft Live Mesh)

[Jeff Waugh]

<quote who="Craig Sanders">

> "planet" RSS aggregators (e.g. Planet Linux Australia) are an
> all-or-nothing deal, so an otherwise useful service (RSS aggregation of
> lots of australian linux-related blog posts) gets spammed with the vacuous
> ephemeral thoughts of a few.

Not all Planets have the same policy. For instance the first Planet site,
Planet GNOME, tends towards having full feeds of GNOME developers, with the
stated intent to create a social venue rather than yet another forum for
discussing project-only issues. It's a place to get to know your fellow
developers ("a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers").

Planet Linux Australia is in a tougher position in many respects, ironically
because it is not a tightly defined project with clear community boundaries.

> if it goes on, i'll have to dump PLA and other aggregators, and run my
> own. which kind of defeats part of the purpose of using an aggregator,
> including: 1. reduced load on the originating blogs, better to have one
> aggregator every 5 minutes than a few hundred direct RSS subscribers, and
> 2. serendipitous discovery of new and interesting blogs as they appear on
> the aggregator.

This is why I made sure an OPML (as horrible as OPML) template was included
by default in Planet. In a good feed reader, you can subscribe to the OPML
(thus getting new additions by the Planet administrators) while being able
to remove the feeds you're not interested in.

:-)

- Jeff

-- 
GUADEC 2008: Istanbul, Turkey                         http://www.guadec.org/
 
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