Community blog aggregators have become popular features of developer communities for good reason – they make it easy to follow the meatiest technical posts about a platform. Also called “Planets” after the Planet server side software often used to assemble them, these sites bring together blogs written by members of a community in a single spot, usually displaying excerpts in a chronological scrolling list of posts that interleave content from many contributors. A Planet ideally is a dynamic, ever-changing mosaic that presents a snapshot of the latest and best thinking going on within a community. Some Planets like Planet KDE (http://planetkde.org/) are mostly technical with a smattering of other stuff. Some like Planet Apache (http://planet.apache.org/committers) are more wide-ranging, reflecting a wide breadth of content.
It seems like it ought to be pretty easy to manage a blog aggregator. In practice it isn’t, and the issues you’ll face are a microcosm of the common issues in building a developer community. One such issue is how you decide whose feed is in, and whose is not.
Ed Burnette’s post “Planet Android and the terrible twos” illustrates this challenge: Planet Android is being swamped by duplicative newsy posts as more and more news and info streams get included in the Planet’s subscriptions. So, do you accept everyone’s feed who wants to be included? Or do you actively edit and design a Planet, selecting specific feeds that are known to deliver a high signal-to-noise ratio, be unique and well-written, and cover a range of interests within your community? If you do choose to be selective, you could base inclusion on an editor’s judgement, but you might be seen as overly controlling. You could let the community vote on which feeds to include, but this presumes that community members will be sufficiently active and motivated to vote on something like this. Perhaps the editor could be a respected community member outside of your organization, so that you’re not seen as controlling it, and yet it is still shaped into a high-value resource.
Knowing and respecting your community is the key to figuring this stuff out. Is your community “strictly business”, and readers don’t want exposure to off-topic or personal blog posts? Or are your community members interested in each other’s ideas and experiences whether they’re technical and on-topic or not? One excellent way to find out – ask!
Whatever you decide – edited or wide-open, be consistent with the rest of the content and governance of your community. If everything else is tightly controlled, developers will be comfortable with an edited Planet. If your community is governed by a loose consensus of participants, a tightly edited Planet will seem out of place.
What do you think? How do you manage your blog aggregator, and how’s it working? What do you like to see in the Planets you visit?