Planetary Madness
For some time now planets, the websites that aggregate together blog entries into one rolling list of community blogs, have been all the rage for getting and consuming information. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore if planets are still the best way to find information, how they should be regulated and whether your blog is really your own, or the community’s…
Remember, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think about planets? Do you read them? Do you get your news and information from there or elsewhere? How do you feel planets should strike the balance between on and off topic content? Do you believe that planets should censor or restrict content? Is it reasonable to post entirely personal content on a planet? Share your views in the shot comments below…
41 Comments to “Planetary Madness”
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With Planets, you can have your cake and eat it too.
The Planet should only be about the subject at hand, but you can also have another one that has everything around it (call it Universe, for example). People could then subscribe to one or the other, depending on what they want to read.
It’s interesting you mention it not being the official place for news on a projects, because actually you get infinitely more news from these planets than you do any official news place. Like take the recent Gnome GUI hackathon, that was blogged extensively on the planet, but if it wasn’t for the planet would anyone outside of those involved even know it had taken place? probably not. So in that respect these planets function as the most important news source for the project.
I think that maybe explains the disconnect you are discussing. On one hand it is just a collection of random posts about subjects the project doesn’t have control over, on the other projects lean on it to provide the necessary news to their community.
Typo fix: On one hand it is just a collection of random posts about subjects the project doesn’t have control over, on the other hand projects lean on it to provide the necessary news to their community.
Hey I just wanted to tell, that “planets” are ABSOLUTLY necessary to get information which hasn’t spead trough identi.ca etc… E.G GIMP Progress and future thoughts… Yes Mailing Lists exist but they are not graphic and they are too “unhandy” with https… But: following progress on “graphicsplanet.org” is VERY helpful. At least to me. An additional GIMP-PLANET would be perfect but for now it would seem a little empty…
I really like reading planets – especially Planet Gnome. I think it’s great for them to be not only about the tech but also personal stuff about what the developers are doing.
about a 1.5 month ago i started a moderated feed of p.g.o. that contains only tech updates. for details see
http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/tutorial-about-how-to-use-hamster-graphics/
(second half of the post)
ah, sorry for spam, did not listen nor read till the end
happens!
peh, totally misunderstood the “links from community” bit that made me think for a minute that it had been mentioned in the podcast but i missed it.
As someone who’s syndicated on a few planets, I wanted to share a couple of comments.
For Planet GNOME specifically, bloggers should be able to talk about personal stuff (see the footer in pgo). I disagreed with RMS – if people don’t like the policy they can always set up their own planet.
For me personally, since I started being aggregated a few years ago, I self-censor a lot more. My blog is close to being about GNOME / Linux only with a few exceptions. I was glad to hear your comments at the end – it is my blog and can post what I want.
Hey guys. Not a regular listener, but I have enjoyed the segments I’ve heard
One aspect of planets that you didn’t mention is what they give to writers: readership. Planet GNOME has about 7500 readers. That’s huge. It’s a great platform to get ideas out.
I actually think that readership has a positive effect on the writing itself — when you know that many people will read what you write, you spend a little more time on it, quality-wise. That’s a kind of “good coercion”, to help writers improve.
I don’t think that writers should feel coerced to change their content, though, on “people planets”; but unfortunately the technology works against us here, because if you are on a planet, and people don’t like what you write, those people typically can’t hide just your blog, or mark you as uninteresting (to them, naturally) — it’s an on-or-off thing.
Advogato really got this right, IMO. Advogato also fed back ratings publically, so you could see who a community respects and whose writings are not interesting to the community as a whole. If someone’s writings are sufficiently uninteresting, they are not displayed by default.
Advo also allows anyone to join up, so you don’t get the cabal factor.
Anyway, disconnected thoughts. Happy hacking
Darn. I had a note about the readership point but it didn’t make it in to the final shot
I completely agree; it’s a great way for people to find out what you’re up to. I remember being hugely excited about being on Planet Gnome.
The “good coercion” point is a rare example of a virtuous circle, I think; people trying harder to improve the quality of their writing improves the quality of the planet overall, which encourages more writing improvement by others to fit into the new milieu, repeat until false.
Good point regarding the virtuous circle, and the construction of good quality. To a degree this applies to good tone as well, and interesting that this is the opposite effect that a mailing list has.
That’s actually a really good point. Mailing lists easily, trivially easily, descend into flames, where one item of flamage begets infinite others. But the virtuous circle doesn’t apply there. I wonder why not? (This sounds like a subject for another shot, heh.)
Well I try to keep my posts to planet Ubuntu on topic to Ubuntu/Gnome/Linux in general. So I have a Ubuntu specific feed. I dont mind seeing anything on a planet because they are there for news that I would be interested in if im not interested I just skip past it so id say if you want to post everything to a planet its fine with me.
My main issue with planets is that in the open source world, they’ve come to mean something somewhat different than what the original old-school planet sites were about. In FOSS, they are blog aggregators, and that’s it. They also tend to mess up the contents of blog entries, in a poor attempt to “protect the user.” Just look at any of Chris Blizzard’s entries on planet.gnome.org. They’re all pretty much turned into a giant unreadable line of html fluff, wrapped around 20 times to fit on the page. You can say “oh, it’s just a bug in the server” but it’s always been that way.
But back in the day, there were real planet sites. Places like planetquake.com, where they were full of not only news about their objective targets, but had pretty much all the information you could ever need about it. User-contributed models, maps, game patches, etc… were all there in one beautiful place.
Now all these “planet” sites popping up are just blog aggregators, and are about providing a “window” into the lives of developers, to show that “developers are people too.” Perhaps they should be called windows instead of planets. windows.gnome.org would be an interesting URL.
Interesting. By that view, planet.gnome.org being a separate thing from gnome.org is a bad thing, no? I suppose it’s easier to manage this sort of thing for a (realtively) small project like Quake by comparison with something sprawling and large like Gnome or Ubuntu.
I like the idea of rebranding them as windows.
What I don’t understand is…if you see something on a planet that doesn’t interest you…what is the big deal with just scrolling down past it?
There is no formal control of what’s on the planet. Some people post whole novels. If I don’t want to read it, I might have to scroll 5 pages to get to the next thing.
What I was complaining about was that the “planet” software will often break the posts and make them unreadable. You have to then go to the original post to be able to view it correctly. It’s not a lack of interest, because I would at least like to see what’s there.
Tell your planetary members to tag their “on topic” posts with some sort of tag i.e. “gnome-planet”
On your planet site code a big toggle button so users can select “on topic” or “off topic” (or “all”, etc)
Done.
The problem you didn’t consider is what to do about people who would use their blogs to spam the planet. Expecting people to not abuse planets is like expecting people to not abuse e-mail. It already happens on some planets, and the only reason it isn’t a bigger problem is because not that many people currently follow planets.
If you don’t have a policy on planet posts, then you don’t have a way of dealing with this. I think it is reasonable for Planet Ubuntu or Planet Gnome to require the blog posts are compatible with their codes of conduct or general philosophy. Jono gave an example regarding gay marriage. That probably wouldn’t offend too many people. However, what if someone were constantly posting about how all homosexuals (or moslems, or some other group) are all destined to burn in hell? That might be a “view into someone’s life”, but it’s not a life that I would particularly look forward to seeing.
There are already people using Planet Gnome to spam us with news about their new proprietary products. If planets don’t have policies to deal with both commercial use or unpleasant politics then planets will end up like e-mail – 95% spam and 5% useful information. Saying that it isn’t too bad yet is just sticking your head in the sand.
Hang on, “commercial use” needs a policy? To do what? Prevent it? So VMWare people shouldn’t be allowed to post about VMWare on Planet Gnome? Maybe you could enlarge on that view a bit?
There are two things that seem to be able to turn Dr. Jeckles into Mr. Hydes on the Internet – money and politics. At present things on many planets are run on a basis of “we’re all friends here and we all promise to be nice to each other”. At present that seems to work most of the time. However, it also used to be that I could publish my e-mail address without getting spam sent to it.
You made a very good point however about whether the Ubuntu CoC should apply to Planet Ubuntu. That’s the “politics” side of the “money and politics” equation. I won’t argue that any further, as you discussed it already.
The “money” side comes from people who would see planets as another form of advertising media. Let’s put it this way. If someone wants to use Planet Gnome (or Planet Ubuntu) to advertise their anatomical enlargement pills, should that be allowed? If not pills, then how about some great introductory offers on video games? Yes? No?
I’m on a moderated mailing list concerning a very specialised field of engineering. Even with moderation we still get salesmen skirting around the edges of the rules to try to sell us their products. After a while it gets tiring reading responses from people who go to great lengths to work their irrelevant (to the actual problem being discussed) products into the conversation.
Planets also need a policy for “commercial use” to prevent abuse. As to what is “abuse” would be up to the particular planet to decide. If the planet decides that companies should be free to advertise their commercial products that have no relationship to the project on the planet, then they should consciously make that decision. If they don’t want companies to do that, then be clear about it. If they leave it nebulous, then sooner or later someone will abuse the situation beyond what others tacitly intended, and then claim the planet administrators were being “unfair” and “arbitrary” when they get kicked off as a result of that. So, the planet needs a policy (or CoC) they can point to when they deal with these situations.
I think the point here, and using VMWare as an example, is that it is not advertising: working for an organization with a commercial product and sharing your thoughts about your work on it and sharing how excited you are about your work is not advertising in my mind.
Everything can be potentially linked to advertising: Ubuntu has commercial agreements and users, does that mean I can’t discuss it? Is Aq not allowed to talk about CouchDB just because it is part of Ubuntu One? would it be wrong for us to blog about the Boxee Shot Of Jaq shot just because that is a commercial product?
The point you’re not addressing is “is there a line somewhere that shouldn’t be crossed?” If there is, then what is it? Can you honestly say that there is absolutely nothing that would ever be forbidden?
Your example of VMWare doesn’t really address the issue. You have simply said that it isn’t advertising. Well, if it isn’t advertising, then it isn’t relevant to the point I was making, is it? However, what would you do about cases that were advertising? Would that be OK or not? If not, well then you would need a policy about it, wouldn’t you?
To be clear about this, I don’t personally care what Planet Gnome or Planet Ubuntu do on this issue. I don’t read either of them often enough to really care. Since we are discussing the subject in general however, I am pointing out the two potential problem areas – money and politics. If you don’t think that these can ever be a problem, then you must be living on a different Internet than I am.
Just to be clear on your particular questions – the projects that you mentioned that you and Aq were working are relevant to people on a Gnome or Ubuntu oriented planet. That is straight forward news. Your example about Boxee isn’t advertising, because you don’t work for Boxee.
However, if Boxee was paying you $10 for every blog post about Boxee that you fed into Planet Gnome or Planet Ubuntu, then the people running those planets might want to have a word with you about it. If their policy didn’t forbid it however, should they have the right to ask you to stop?
With Maemo we not only run a Planet, but also do some analytics to figure out the most important blog posts of the day, to be presented on the front page of the site.
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/maemo_social_news_launched/ http://maemo.org/news/
Hey Henri,
I think this is a great idea: we do a similar thing with Ubuntu with the Ubuntu Weekly News – it is a great way of bringing the cream to the top.
It depends on the planet as to whether it should just cover the subject at hand. I’ve discovered some very interesting things on one subject because of posts that have appeared on an unrelated planet. I wouldn’t want too much of this, however.
I’ve only been using planets for about a year or two and I find them very useful. A great way to aggregate and takes a lot of hassle out of having to find blogs related to areas of interest. I’ve not encountered a badly maintained planet so far, but I’m sure there are some out there.
I agree: I have often found so much interested information that is unrelated to the core function of the planet, just because people have blogged it.
Planet Ubuntu Users, http://ubuntuweblogs.org/, has got two different planets: Planet Ubuntu Users — limited to Ubuntu, offenders get warned — and Ubuntu Universe, which pulls in all the blog posts from the aggregated users. But being added to that planet is optional.
I don’t know whether there are any guidelines for Planet Ubuntu, I haven’t found a a strict set, for the least. But some documentation does mention the fact that it is best practice to put up an Ubuntu-specific category and feed the feed for that category to Planet Ubuntu. However, some users do blog about personal life. But others, like me, use a specific Ubuntu category.
But I do think that allowing everything on Planet Ubuntu would be the nicest planet. Because a planet is about community and you need all blog posts in order to get a proper view of it. Like said in the Shot, those blogs are personal views and personal blog posts would make the planet more personal. There are fridge.ubuntu.com and blog.canonical.com for official announcements. (Maybe the fridge should be removed from the planet in order to distinguish more clearly.)
Taken from Ubuntu Wiki(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PlanetUbuntu): “The Code of Conduct applies to all actions by Ubuntu members, including posting to their blogs.”
A Twitter/Identi.ca planet is a nice idea, I would like it.
In kde’s planet web page you’ve got a button to see microblogging posts of the people who are aggregated there.
After some discussion, the Mozilla policy for Planet Mozilla is to aggregate everything – Mozilla-related or not – from community members.
Gerv
Can you elaborate a bit more on the different sides in the discussion? Did it just reflect the arguments within the Gnome community which we described in the shot, or were there extra considerations?
I think mostly it was longstanding tradition, coupled with the example of pgo — or at least this is how I rationalized policies when they were eventually instituted. Having read both Planet GNOME and Planet Mozilla for several years, I’d gotten well used to posts whose viewpoints I found disagreeable, and I found insights into individuals useful even when divined from “off-topic” posts, so I wasn’t a fan of restricting solely to on-topic posts.
Worth noting: those policies weren’t put in place in response to a disputed-viewpoint kerfuffle but rather because the previous maintainer of pmo made a somewhat arbitrary decision to remove someone from it — and then it was decided to make things more regular, understandable, and transparent, from which the current oversight structure and policies emanated. Or so I remember, it’s been several years and I am loathe to spend time looking up exact history; the mozilla.governance newsgroup is probably where the history of it lies.
Most of those I read include whatever the users want to say – mostly relevant to the Planet, sometimes only tangentially so, and sometimes entirely unrelated. Works for me…
Cheers for picking up my idea guys!
I’m not aggregated in any planets. For a while, I was subscribed to the RSS feed for my LUG’s planet (http://hants.lug.org.uk/planet/). However, I found that it was too full of completely LUG-unrelated stuff from people I didn’t know, and lost interest. Now, I follow some of the people who are aggregated on the planet, but on Twitter. I find this a much better way of consuming this sort of info.
The shot covered the 2 events that prompted me to suggest the it very well (the Planet Gnome/VMWare debacle and Jono’s same sex post). These two events got me a bit hot under the collar about the whole idea of planets, and made them seem more to me than something I wasn’t interested in reading.
For example, when the GNU project attacked Planet GNOME, there’s the possibility that people who are interested in the GNU project would incorrectly see GNOME as “freedom haters”, for something that’s nothing to do with the GNOME project.
With regards to Jono’s post, I was pretty shocked by some of the comments. I expected some comments to disagree with the post (there would have been no need to post it otherwise), but there were people saying things to the effect of “Let’s keep this filth away from Ubuntu, it could cost us users”. Now, part of me thinks that if Jono’s viewpoint costs the ubuntu community users, we don’t want those kind of users anyway. However, I’m also concerned that those people who disagree strongly with the viewpoint and are already active in the community may feel alienated, when the issue has nothing at all to do with Ubuntu, nor should it (hence why it was in a personal blog in the first place).
I’d like to think that most users can tell the difference between “official” Ubuntu points of view and community members’ personal blogs, but things like this and the recent ReadWriteWeb/Facebook confusion show that they can’t. Quite simply, if planets didn’t exist, these potentially detrimental misunderstandings wouldn’t happen so easily.
Hello Marx,
Nice comment. One point of clarification though: the GNU project never attacked Planet GNOME.
I wrote more about this topic here: http://wingolog.org/archives/2009/12/13/gnu-gnome-and-the-fsf
Happy hacking,
Andy
My Bad! I’m am aware that GNU != FSF, but I obviously misremembered the facts there!
I’ve been meaning to post a comment for days and I see Sense beat me to part of what I was going to say. I’m on both Planet Ubuntu Users and on their sister planet Ubuntu Universe. I love that Tiago set up one planet for specifically posts about Ubuntu and while I am seeing some duplication from other planets I subscribe to it’s a great way to see info about Ubuntu that I’d otherwise miss.
Ubuntu Universe, on the other hand, lets their bloggers post about anything and everything. It’s nice to know that not only will by Ubuntu-related posts get seen by a wider audience than just my blog, but thanks to UU I’m getting readers for all of my posts, whether they’re about Ubuntu, my love for the Dodgers, or even something great I find on my local NPR station. If I were to write about gay marriage (I’m definitely in favor of it btw) that post would be entirely welcomed on Ubuntu Universe, and readers are more than welcome to skip down to the next post on the Universe if they find a post of mine utterly boring, even flat out asinine, or even simply POOMA (pulled out of my arse).
The best part is that it was incredibly easy to set up my participation in UU so that posts on the blog by my sister don’t get show up on the planet. (My blog is actually my sister’s, but she’s shared it with me since I closed my personal blog a couple of years ago.)
I’ve subscribed to your blog’s feed but I’d be glad to see your posts on something like UU.
Ok, is it me, or does Jono sound drunk in this?
KDE does this pretty well – they have the Planet – random stuff to do with anything, and they have the dot (dot.kde.org) which has a list of the news etc etc.
Wait, doesn’t Ubuntu have the fridge?