Comments on: Thoughts on Planet Mozilla

By: Eric Jung

Eric Jung — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:41:18 +0000

I’ve read all comments, and I’m surprised no one has mentioned that this is precisely what mostnews organizations do. BBC, CNet, CNN, etc–they all have multiple feeds organized by topic. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm for BBC’s list (under “CHOOSE A FEED”)

By: Gordon P. Hemsley

Gordon P. Hemsley — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 04:58:00 +0000

I haven’t read most of the comments, but I would like to express my support for this idea. I am currently (literally, right now) working through my backlog of articles in my feedreader—about half of which belong to Mozilla Planet or an offshoot thereof. (The other half is from Ars Technica.)

In the past, I have often simply marked as read articles that were older than a week old, and I still had ~100 articles left per feed. I’ve also pruned some feeds altogether because I never read them, or they give me duplicate information.

I would love to be able to weed out the articles that I don’t care about. I would probably subscribe to a number of the categories you suggested, but at least I’d be able to opt-out of a couple. And 10 feeds with 15 new articles is psychologically a lot less daunting than one feed with 150 new articles.

By: Sam Hasler

Sam Hasler — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:22:10 +0000

“It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” – Clay Shirky

I gave up on the p.m.o. RSS feed a while back because few feed readers don’t have decent filters in them and Yahoo Pipes were hard to manage. I switched to following @plannetmozilla on twitter using TwitFactory with a ton of filters (http://bit.ly/7Hkgpe ) to sort tweets into various folders or trash. It’s interface is slow, and I have to use Firefox’s SQLite plugin to edit it’s Filters so I’ll be abandoning TwitFactory as soon as RainDrop is mature enough to use.

By: Jeff Walden

Jeff Walden — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:08:34 +0000

Matthew, there’s a Planet Mozilla Blog which provides updates on feed changes, additions, removals, etc. to p.m.o which can be used to keep up with its evolution even without subscribing directly to p.m.o.

http://blog.mozilla.com/planet/

Simply due to the volume of a couple other blogs I read, I switched to subscribing to all Planet members individually (minus a very few), and — for my purposes, given the other things I read — I find it works well. It also lets me read stuff from several short-sighted contributors who syndicate only Mozilla-related stuff to p.m.o.

By: Eddie Tolman

Eddie Tolman — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:06:33 +0000

I completely agree. I don’t subscribe to the feed due to the sheer number of posts, but I do read through it every day after work. I live it when I find a new blog to follow, but since I am a Mozilla consumer and not a contributor I don’t get anything out of posts on coding, Firebug, or the poorly formatted meeting minutes. If there were a way to blacklist certain feeds (or if someone actually distilled those meeting minutes), the planet would be a whole lot less polluted.

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:36:10 +0000

For people who use feed readers, planet mozilla provides an opml file, which can be tweaked more easily than the global feed.

I have a freshly written xslt stylesheet over there; for planet mozilla (in the generic folder) it merely adds a p.m.o tag google reader uses: http://github.com/g2p/opml-planets

By: Matthew Gertner

Matthew Gertner — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:24:58 +0000

That’s great, Deb! I thought there were probably discussions along these lines, but I figured a bit of whining and nagging on my part never hurt anyone.

By: Matthew Gertner

Matthew Gertner — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:23:45 +0000

Thanks, Ian, I appreciate the sentiment.

By: dria

dria — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:21:27 +0000

The Planet Mozilla team has had a few discussions along these lines, but I think the issue has been the technical difficulty of actually implementing a system that will automatically and cleanly categorize posts from a ton of different blogging systems.

We were exploring a possible solution prior to the holidays but haven’t revisited that yet. I’ll get that process restarted today.

I agree, for what it’s worth, 100%. Figuring out how to divide Planet into topic-specific channels would be brilliant. That’s more-or-less what we’re trying to figure out.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:46:58 +0000

I agree.. I used to read BoingBoing all the time.. but I have started to find a lot of the news depressing, so I don’t read it anymore, and actively avoid it… Its a wonderful site, but if I kept reading it, I would need to take more anti depressants… way more.