Thoughts on aggregators / planets

Just in case you are unaware, a planet in the blogging context is an aggregation of content from a list of individual sources such as blogs, journals, articles etcetera. Some examples of planets in no particular order:

Over the last couple of weeks there have been some heated words on various planets about what is acceptable content for that planet. I don’t run any of those planets so I’m not going to comment on specifics. I’ve also seen people who operate planets asking for people to join them, but only if they will post on a particular topic — in fact I’ve recently seen a request on a mailing list, which itself receives off-topic personal posts from members of its community, for bloggers who will only write on-topic posts on that community’s planet. And I’ve been added to planets which then later ask me to obey posting guidelines.

To me all this is very odd. I personally read various planets because I want to know more about the people who are in those communities and what they are up to. I appreciate the on topic posts they write but often I appreciate the slightly more personal ones even more. I like to see what people are interested in and what their values are, so to then restrict the posts to a particular topic to me seems to be counter-productive.

For the one planet that I do run, when I ask people if I can add them to it I sometimes receive the response, “Do you want me to use a tag?” or, “I’m sorry I don’t have a tag set up for this, you might get a lot of non-technical posts.” Great! If I was going to have expectations over what you are writing about then I would expect to be paying you to be a technical author for me. I don’t want that; I’m interested in what you are about.

Someone else said something like “in this day and age we have the technology to have the aggregator provide custom feeds with some people removed, and this is the way forward in dealing with people you really can’t stand to read”. I’m paraphrasing that, and I don’t remember who said it or where, but I couldn’t agree more. To me the planet is a view in to the community it represents and being a member of that community is usually all that is required to have a feed included. It does not mean that the planet operator endorses everything they say, that the reader should agree with their viewpoints or that the reader will find them an interesting person! We are presumably all grown-ups here and we can decide what to read or not.

If you are a paid blogger or if you want to make a name for yourself writing articles about a given subject then fair enough, I can understand why you might want to mark only certain articles for publication to a certain audience.

I don’t write much of value or anything contentious. I don’t write much at all, except links to strange things. I haven’t ever had a planet operator tell me that something I wrote wasn’t appropriate for their planet, but that’s probably because I’m not syndicated to many of them. But I would definitely ask to be removed before I would agree to tag posts.

Is it ever healthy to run an aggregator of personal blogs and then expect to exert editorial control over that?

5 thoughts on “Thoughts on aggregators / planets

  1. I agree that the planets should just reflect who is part of them. I got some flak in private email from someone who added my blog to their planet (can’t remember which one now, nor can I find it. Guess they removed me!) after I posted http://www.sungate.co.uk/?p=260 which rather surprised me.

  2. See also http://www.jedimoose.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/15/galaxy-galaxy/

    I think it depends on the nature of the planet – there tend to be 2 types of planet (IME):

    – Planets that intend to inform people about a particular project by virtue of providing input from multiple developers
    – Planets that extend a community / social network

    For the former, I would expect the content to be (ideally) limited to the topic in hand. For the latter, I wouldn’t. Where this becomes tricky is either where a planet tries to do both, or where you have people viewing the planet from both sides of the coin, but only wanting one…

  3. It depends… I’m all for people writing about unrelated topics, but there is of course a limit. At some point the usefulness of the planet suffers – if only one post in twenty on, say, planet.debian.net was related to debian would you still read it?

  4. Some planets explicitly set out to represent the community. HantsLUG’s planet does this for example. I’m happy to see random witterings on there, although I suppose we might have to do something about explicit material. Not really thought that one through.

    On the other hand, I can see why a planet might just want to syndicate on a particular subject, particularly if it’s not related to a specific community and just wants to collate relevant information. I’ve heard readers of some planets say they stopped reading because of too much off-topic noise on planets.

    Personally I have been on at least one planet which wanted to take a specific topic, so I was happy to just add relevant posts to a category. Hell, I did it for my cats, so why not other things. I don’t think it’s undue editoral control, after all it’s their website, they get to chose what goes on there and what doesn’t. If I can contribute to it and it’s no skin off my nose to do so then why not?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *