So I’m playing around more with Newsburst today, and one thing that struck me was the organization of the defaults. Where in the world did they come from? You could do this with most any category, but let’s take a look at “Open Source”:
- Builder.com.com — not sure what the site is doing, but the feed does have two mentions of open source software, but it seems to just be re-branded stories from News.com, so I’m not sure what the point is.
- Linux Dell Blog — Frequently down but hardcore open source.
- jfleck — I suppose the connection is he contributes to Gnome. Okay… No posts about OS on the front page, and even the category they subscribe to looks to be updated about twice a month.
- Kuro5hin — A great site, but nothing about Open Source in the feed lately. It’s more tech-culture.
- Linux.com — dry, but valid.
- linux kernel monkey log — valid.
- Miguel de Icaza — Good choice.
- NewsForge — groovy.
- Lockergnome Tech News Watch — covers tech but not too much OS
- Scripting News — Many things, but not an open source blog. Besides, it’s listed several other places already.
- Slashdot — who would argue with this?
What would be cool if Newsburst let me tag a feed when I subscribed to it, then highlight popular tags and the most popular “sources” within them. Forget what they think “open source” is, I want the opensource tag.
The way to get people hooked on blogs has nothing to do with RSS feeds or river of conciousness displays or whatever, it’s all the fantastic content that’s being created out there by people in the trenches. If you had a passing interest in learning about open source, you would get 60+% junk if you subscribed to that channel group. Where is Blake Ross’ passion about Firefox, Mitch Kapor, ZDNet’s OS Blog, Sitepoint’s, Spread Firefox, or anything from the people that are creating the applications that are changing the way we live, work, and play? Are blogs that talk about open source that hard to find?
I can add a lot of others: nat.org/blog, tech9.net/rml, http://dirtsimple.org/ (which is one of the best i’ve ever seen), http://primates.ximian.com/~gonzalo/mono/blog/, and many more, if you look at planetpython, planetgnome, planetdebian…
That’s coincidental; I just posted a bit about open source on my blog (click my name) yesterday, in which I talked about creating a Firefox plugin for searching your del.icio.us bookmarks. Open Source is one of my blog’s many many topics.
Yeah, you are correct, the research — or lack thereof — for the default categories is very apparent. They could have gone to 100 or so bloggers to get opinions on blogs for each of the categories, but it’s almost like someone pulled out a dartboard to choose some of the categories. And having the same source listed in multiple categories when there are over eight million sources to choose from seems lazy.
I think discovery is the hardest part for sources of all sorts, and your critique of the sources is helpful. The problem of categorization is (again) tied to how top-down you want to be versus bottom-up. Both have utility, I believe.
The Recommended Sources will change over time, as we learn more from our audience and cycle back through the ongoing explosion of sources.
Lots to learn.
Mines not hard to find… http://linux.quicksurf.com/