Life is so good, it gets better every day

RSS – Mostly Harmless

Both Alec and Alan commented on the potentially harmful use of RSS with people publishing the full content in the RSS feed, both with seemingly different use cases and it’s pretty obvious that no good approach to blogging has yet emerged, yet it feels like aggregators like PlanetGNOME, PlanetDebian and PlanetFedora have accelerated the use of blogging and information sharing.

PlanetSun seems to be moving towards the same problems as PlanetGNOME – who gets added, how often are they blogging and whether their full entry is published in the RSS feed. I’m sure Jeff will be able to comment a little more or this. We have a ‘Sun Bloggers’ internal alias within Sun, and while I only subscribed sometime last week, a lot of the comments seem to get caught up over commenting mechanisms. I don’t have comments on my blog for a few reasons, as for me [and my current use case of occassionally reading PlanetSun, PlanetGNOME and a few other random places] they take potentially useful information away from the main flow of things, they are a spam target, they increase the number of click throughs that other people have to do [and vice versa], and increase the complexity of the blogging and aggregating software. Should I have used the commenting mechanism replying? Perhaps, but then fewer people would have seen these posts and potentially fewer people brainstorming on a solution.