Planetary damage
Danny Ayers writes:
I can’t really be bothered blogging all the new SemWeb stuff these days, most of it ends up on Planet RDF anyhow.
What Danny probably doesn’t realize it that he’s pretty much my only connection to the Semantic Web stuff, leaving me with a rather false impression about how much actual stuff is coming out these days. Of course, I read Shelley Powers, but she’s more of an RDF Comet than a planet, and the other five or six RDF-heads I subscribe to almost never post about anything, RDF-related or not. I’m not about to subscribe to the Planet RDF feed, since I’d wind up reading Danny twice, and other people I don’t choose to read, so Planet RDF actually deprives me of RDF news.
And, prior to this post, Planet Mozilla was doing the same thing to my readers: since most of what I might write about has already long since shown up there, I don’t write about it, and as a result I’ve certainly got at least one reader who would have and should have installed Firefox 1.5 rc 1, but hasn’t because I didn’t write about it being available, and what’s in it, and who ought to be testing it, because it had already been on planet.m.o half a dozen times before I might have written about it. But no more: the main reason I’m writing this post, beside wanting to put the idea in some heads that a Planet isn’t always a good thing, is to create yet another category, so I can redirect the feed Planet Mozilla fetches to only get things I put in the “Planet Fodder” category, which will let me start writing about Mozilla again. Odd, that.
Planets ought to be good things; it’s just that feed aggregators don’t know that post N on the planet’s feed is post X on the individual poster’s feed, and so you see it twice. Surely this problem should have gone away by now?