Content aggregation was realized on the http://planet.gnome.org/ website with the help of the Planet software. In the backend, different RSS streams are combined into one, and the planet gnome websites is rendering the result on the screen. On the first look, the website looks straight forward, because the user gets under one URL all the news from different blogs. But something is wrong with planet gnome. It looks very similar to the Google+ social network. The problem is that the user gets all the information combined on a single place, is asked for reading all the content but it is too much for him.
A normal single blog can be consumed without too much problem. The user sees a certain amount of information and if he is no longer interested he can close the tab. The problem with Planet Gnome is, that if the user will close the tab, he can miss all the important news. But it's not possible for a normal untrained user to get an overview over the news. The reason is, that the articles were written by a decentralized community which is working independend from each other. That means, planet gnome presents a shuffle of all the information. On the first look, this is a great idea, but it overwhelms the user.
The problem of aggregated information will become more visible if the domain is much larger and presents apart from only LInux related information much more content. The well known Google+ was an example. Google+ is some kind of improved Planet gnome. The user finds normal information from the open Source community but also information about sport, entertainment and much more.
Can we slow down the idea of a content aggregator? The index.html document from the project can be downloaded with the wget utility and contains 252 kb which is a lot. It contains of dynamic generated content which is displayed with a CSS stylesheet. The website is curated on the fly, that means, the user sees always the latest news and is well informed. This kind of websites produce a high workload for the enduser. It can be compared if somebody becomes 100 journals at the same time on his desk and should them read all in under an hour. Somebody may argue, that this is the idea of news aggregator to produce an information overload, but i think the technology can be improved a bit.
There are two possible modifications, the first one is to curate the content by hand. Instead of deliver the complete content stream a human curator selects the relevant information. The second step is to overcome the planet software and use a mediawiki installation for displaying the content. A mediawiki has the advantage that the user isn't forced into a passive role but can change the content on the website. That means, if he doesn't like a certain headline, he can login with an account and remove the article. I believe, that a mediawiki can display aggregated content more easier to read. The difference is, that the content creation is not done in the background by advanced planet scripts but by human users, and the reader can become the curator if he likes. Humans like the idea, if they are not forced in a passive role but have control over a situation.
The current planet Gnome website, but also the former Google+ social network have treated the reader as a victim. They have delivered all the aggregated content to him but didn't provided space for experienced based learning.
I would like to explain the idea of a news wiki a bit. The RSS newsstream from the planet gnome project is a nice starting point for connecting different blogs into a larger system but it is only the first step. A group of people has to take the stream as input and create wiki pages for each article. Let me give an example. The headlines today were:
1. “Why crowdfunding freely licensed documentation is illegal in Finland” -> blogspot.com
2. “GDA 5.2.9 Released” -> gnome.org
3. “GTK 3.96.0” -> gtk.org
All the headlines are produced by the syndicated RSS stream. The task of the user is to convert each headline into a seperate wiki page. That means, the crowdfunding article gets a page and at the end, the link to the original website is added. The second GDA article gets a wiki page and the link to the gnome.org website is added.
This kind of manual wiki creation sounds complicated but it is not that hard. If the articles are in the wiki system, the RSS won't delivered to the user, but he gets the easy to read wiki-website. If he likes to provide feedback he can write it to the talk page. And if he want's to improve typo mistakes he can edit each page direct. The mediawiki system allows it to detect spam and vandalism quickly, this principle is known from the Wikipedia website and it is working for a news website as well.
Each day, around 3 headlines are published at planet gnome, in a years this would be equal to 3*365=1095 wiki pages which have to be created from scratch. In a wiki the content would like much cleaner in comparison to the current planet gnome website. And it's even possible to provide a RSS stream of all the articles.
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