

Planet Startup - Community Aggregator for Startup Blogs - wheels

In the spirit of various "planets" in the Open Source world, some of us in the #startups Freenode IRC channel and others have gotten are now syndicating on "Planet Startup".  I finally got around to cleaning the CSS up some last night, so I figured this was as good a time as any to bring it to a wider audience.<p>http://planetstartup.directededge.com/<p>Other Planets:<p>http://www.planetkde.org/ | http://planet.gnome.org/ | http://planet.ubuntu.com/<p>And so on.  If we hit a critical mass I'll move it over to its own domain.  Got a startup related blog?  Let me know.<p>This is an opt-in only thing in an attempt to build a community, not an aggregation of Scott's Favorite Blogs.  Among other things, this consolidates some of the news.YC folks' blogs into one feed.
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lux
Cool, I read a few of the other 'planet' sites as well and this would be a
welcome addition to the list! It's nice to have topical aggregators for things
shared insights or individual company news that aren't quite newsworthy to the
general populace (yet! ;).

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petercooper
Good job, but there appears to be one feed / source that's nothing but
uninteresting (mostly because they're personal responses) Twitter-type
entries. @Peter starts a lot of them..

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wheels
Yeah, there are some good posts in that feed, so I'm going to try to set up a
filter that knocks out anything that starts with @.

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petercooper
I suspect there are quite a few rules / heuristics that could be used to
improve the quality of "planet" sites overall. Those in the topic areas I'm
interested in tend to pick good sources, but those sources can occasionally be
"noisy" and irrelevant to the planet. This leads people to subscribe more to
summary blogs (to my advantage in my main niche).

It's probably rather beyond what you're hoping to achieve, but with some time
and thought, I bet there's a way to build planet sites that have an incredibly
high signal to noise ratio rather than the almost equal one they tend to have
right now.

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wheels
I think aggregations typically fall into one of a couple of category: topical,
from the trenches news, or community building sites.

I'm mostly hoping that this will be a community building site, and in that
case I think that some off-topicness is acceptable. I'd say that a target
signal-to-noise ratio is about 80% :-)

The other 20% helps to give character to the people that are being tracked. At
least for "planets" like the three I mentioned in the original post, the site
is mostly for the people that are collectively posting there, and has the side
effect of making it possible for fans to easily peek behind the scenes.

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petercooper
If that's your goal, then that's okay. Good luck!

I should warn, however, that being included in a planet can cause some people
to think a little too much about what they post. My _personal_ blog is
included in a planet and I'm often wondering whether I'll get kicked out if I
post something irrelevant or cause too much noise. Really, I should be able to
get that planet to subscribe to a certain /category/ on my blog so I get the
choice. Just bringing this up in case it becomes a point later on..

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wheels
Many blogs do allow for RSS feeds based on categories, and I know of a number
of people that have their blogs aggregated based on those category feeds. If a
particular feed gets too noisy that's something that we'll deal with (as I've
seen done on other planets), but there that usually amounts to, "Uhm, can you
set up a category feed?"

I personally just have three separate blogs -- one for a few friends, my KDE
blog which is fairly widely syndicated, and now the Directed Edge one. I tend
to include bits of personal information in my KDE blog from time to time, but
still keep in mind that it's mostly being read by people interested in my open
source work, not girls I'm dating. ;-)

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jdavid
jdavid.net for anyone that wants to read about my tech interests, rants,
projects, startup life, and or some other personal adventures.

i will be rethinking my blog in summer so any comments on what would interest
folks like you would be of value. I also plan to better edit my blog in the
next 2 years than i have in the last 2 years.

