Planet Mozilla: Channels

January 20th, 2010Mozilla, Mozilla community, Planet Mozilla, Work 16 Comments

Matt Gertner posted some of his Thoughts about Planet Mozilla earlier today, and I agree completely that auto-filtered and individually-subscribable Planet topic channels would be awesome.

This is something the Planet team was discussing prior to the holidays, but we hadn’t picked it up again until prompted by Matt’s post. It turns out that we should be able to rig the existing Planet software to do more or less what Matt suggests, we’re just not currently sure how well the software will deal with a large number of channels.

I figure we may as well start by defining the ideal and work backwards from it if we run into technical limitations. I’ve expanded upon Matt’s proposed category list, and started defining a set of keywords and keyphrases that the Planet software would use to filter posts into each category.

I’ve posted that list on the Mozilla wiki, and would like your feedback and help. What categories are missing? Which could be safely consolidated? What other keywords should we filter on for each? Etc. You can edit that page directly if you like, or leave a comment on this post. Thanks!

16 Responses to “Planet Mozilla: Channels”

  1. Benjamin Smedberg Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 6:07 pm

    The goal being to reduce the volume for individual readers? Instead of preset categories, why not just let inviduals set up their own feeds with keywords they care about? e.g. a webform:

    * Include posts with the following keywords: [text input], [checkbox] Include all posts
    * Exclude posts with the following keywords: [text input]

    Technically in many feed readers, the same item in multiple feeds isn’t merged, so you’d end up reading the same item multiple times if you subscribed to multiple category feeds and they overlapped at all (which they are sure to, given the keyword scheme).

  2. David Boswell Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 6:10 pm

    Sounds like a great idea. My only feedback is that we might want to come up with different category names for what is currently labeled as Mozilla Messaging and Mozilla Foundation. That seems to focus too much on the organizational structure instead of what those groups are trying to achieve.

    ‘Mozilla Messaging’ could just be ‘Messaging’. I’ll try to think of alternatives to the ‘Mozilla Foundation’ channel and let you know if something good comes up.

    David

  3. dria Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 6:36 pm

    @benjamin That would require writing new software, where the current scheme is something we could set up in a day using the existing Planet software. We would need some hackers to step forward to actually build what you’re suggesting.

    If someone wants to build it, that would be fantastic.

  4. LpSolit Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 6:37 pm

    I think it’s sad to split planet into different feeds. What’s cool with the current planet, besides the totally unrelated posts about your last vacation or these IMO totally useless meme posts (see bug 339336), is that you can read articles which you wouldn’t normally read if you had to select some given categories. Just looking at the title is enough for me to decide if I’m going to read an article or not, and I doubt there are so many posts per day that one wastes more than 10 minutes per day to triage relevant articles.

  5. dria Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 6:38 pm

    @lpsolit There would still be an “everything” feed for people who are interested in the whole thing :)

  6. dria Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 6:39 pm

    @dboswell Good call. Topics over organizations, absolutely. Feel free to change the Foundation category name when you come up with something more appropriate.

  7. Nick Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 7:59 pm

    I personally like to see almost everything except some of the minutes and some of the long buglist posts.

    Another possibility would be to have a “skip this post” link on each post. That would allow people to quickly skip over the long posts (eg. minutes, buglists) that they don’t care about. It would be a lot simpler than having channels, and I imagine channels will be difficult to get right, people will always complain about item X being in a particular channel while item Y is not…

  8. Alex Vincent Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 8:15 pm

    I wonder if there should be a category for tech notes (how-to’s, code snippets, interesting bits of the platform). Stuff that potentially could be referenced on MDC. Another possible category would be “Learning Experiences” – tales of developers working with Mozilla tech and writing out what they learn, sharing those experiences.

    I find that my best blog posts fall into one of these two spaces.

  9. Majken "Lucy" Connor Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 11:43 pm

    I think adding these categories will help the barrier to entry. I only recently started following planet, and what I do is add it to my twitter stream.

    While I find many areas of Mozilla interesting, the long posts about refactoring code are just over my head. I think the categories are a good idea for people who have specific interests, and those people might not have time, or be willing to invest time into following everything.

    I like having meeting minutes as its own category. I think this will be really useful for people who want to keep up with what’s going on, but don’t want to read all the blog posts in between.

    I would make use of a “greater community” category. IMO this could be used for broader events (aka not web developer specific) and calls for input on feature changes, design challenges etc.

  10. johnjbarton Says:
    January 21st, 2010 at 1:06 am

    Sorry, but in my opinion dividing Planet Mozilla will kill it. The whole and sole point of “Planet” is “Everything”. It’s my way of knowing what all goes on at mozilla blogs. And I know when I post to http://blog.getfirebug.com/ many Mozilla people in many different areas will see the post. If you divide it, I will have to go around to the newsgroup and repost the information there. That will be a waste of my time and yours.

    Please don’t divide the Planet.

  11. Jeff Walden Says:
    January 21st, 2010 at 4:00 am

    Suppose we adopted this scheme. How then would I categorize an Appalachian Trail post in which I mentioned that I’d worked on a web tech blog post one day amongst a series of days spent hiking: where I described that post, commented on its purpose and motivation, and offered my opinion on Mozilla- and web-relevant topics to which that post pertained? (I’m slowly drafting such a post now.) There would probably be 85% non-Mozilla, but 10-15% would be very heavily Mozilla- and web development-concentrated. Assuming I were willing to do so (I don’t think I am; it wouldn’t properly convey my mental goal-setting [breaking it down into bite-sized pieces] during the hike), would I either start chopping up such posts into single-day bites to ensure Mozilla-ish days got their own categorized posts, or would I simply mark an 80%-not-Mozilla post as part of all the right categories for that 15% regardless?

    I recognize that my A.T. posts are sui generis, but I don’t think the system would adequately handle them. Even once I finish the A.T. posts, I think Planet contributors will continue to write individual posts encompassing numerous topics from time to time; I think these posts of this nature are worth considering with respect to any proposed scheme.

  12. Pree Says:
    January 21st, 2010 at 4:15 am

    This is great news!

    I think it will align us more with the requests of our audience, especially given the survey feedback.

    I’d personally err on the side of “less is more” in terms of channels; I’m having flashbacks of over-the-air television (with its five channels) vs. the cable of today (with its significantly more channels, but much harder to find stuff you’re looking for…)

    That doesn’t mean that we can’t add more later; I just think the number of channels listed at the wiki page are a bit daunting.

    Ones I’d remove and/or merge: user support, accessibility, QA/testing, BD/legal, status updates (not sure what this is?), developer relations, governance, events/conference/meetings, non-mozilla posts (since that’s “everything”).

    (In general, filter out topics about specific things, e.g. user support _about Firefox_, accessibility _about Firefox_; those posts would [ostensibly] go into the Firefox category.

  13. Gerv Says:
    January 21st, 2010 at 8:29 am

    Can this system plug in to the categories that some people assign to their blogposts in their blogging software, or is it only keyword-based?

    I also think that the whole duplicate entry thing is going to be a serious problem. I can imagine people being interested in, say, 50% of these feeds. If merely mentioning the words “Firefox and Thunderbird add-ons” puts the post in three feeds, then they are going to spend a lot of time marking duplicates as read.

    Gerv

  14. dria Says:
    January 21st, 2010 at 9:17 am

    This is great — tons of awesome points here and a lot of stuff I hadn’t considered. This isn’t going to be something we’ll be implementing in the near future (Fx 3.6 release would be a bad time to break Planet), so there’s lots of time to think this through.

    It may be that we can’t actually change Planet at all — if that ends up being the case, does anyone have thoughts on another way to address the signal:noise issues? A lot of people don’t read Planet at all (many used to but have stopped) because it’s just too much — how could we help ensure those people could get the information they want without having to wade through the whole stream?

  15. Matthew Gertner Says:
    January 21st, 2010 at 9:41 am

    Benjamin: my idea was that no feed would occur in multiple Planet subsets. Instead, authors who want to be in multiple subsets would tag their posts appropriately to have them sent to the (most) correct subset (each tag would have its own feed).

    This wouldn’t entirely solve the issue of multiple occurrences (authors could use multiple tags) but hopefully it would mitigate it enough to constitute a good solution for the time being, until something more technically sophisticated is put into place.

  16. Sam Hasler Says:
    January 23rd, 2010 at 12:07 pm

    Those categories probably won’t work for a lot of people. For instance with:

    >Messaging
    > thunderbird, mozilla messaging, raindrop

    I’m interested in raindrop but not thunderbird, so that category would still have too much noise to signal for me.

    I’d suggest that once you’ve got a complete list of keywords & keyphrases to create a form for asking the community which of them they’re interested in, and then mining the results for groups of keywords that are often selected together to find ones that might not be obvious, or to see which popular but low volume keywords are in categories with high volume keywords.

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