Why the fuss over non-English blogs?

Posted: April 21st, 2006 | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

I’m really rather puzzled by why people consider having non-English blogs on Fedora Planet so troublesome. I’m monitoring perhaps 20 big news / blog aggregator sites through the LiFeRea RSS reader, which makes managing large volumes of news output frankly trivial. Out of easily 100’s of articles that get published every day, I can quickly dismiss 90% just based on the title alone, for 10% I might read the short summary content, and 1% I’ll read in full. Dimissing a story I’m not interested in takes one key press to move to the next new article. So really, the inclusion of a handful of foreign language blogs is line-noise & with unmeasurable impact on the amount of time it takes to process my daily news feeds.

So for someone not interested in reading them, the inclusion of a handful of foreign language blogs is line-noise & with unmeasurable impact on the amount of time it takes to process a daily news feeds. Conversely for people who do want to read them there is a clear benefit from having all Fedora blogs on one aggregator.

If there is anything at all highlighted by the introduction of these new feeds its just how far technology regressed when the world ditched NNTP in favour of the web. The capabilities for organizing, filtering & generally managing news feeds over RSS pale in comparison to the old NNTP news readers – no I’m not talking about the lame Netscape news reader – I’m refering to tools like trn or tin – the mutt of news readers! The focus should be on producing better RSS readers…

I for one welcome our French Fedora bloggers, even though I (shamefully) can’t understand what they’re saying :-)