Regardless of the method, I think there should be two enlightenment
information streams: one for users and one for developers. Yes there
are mailing lists, but the lists have a lot of garbage you need to dig
through to get at the interesting bits. The value of a blog or twitter
is that it's a distilled information form that keeps you up-to-date with
the major trends. For example:
Users would be interested in: Significant application & theme updates,
new *useable* applications & themes, major news from the developers
Developers are interested in: Development shifts, Programming articles,
Experimental projects, Research articles, etc.
Most developers will be following the user stream, so there's no reason
to duplicate the information in their stream.
Each item is essentially going to be an article. These articles need to
reside somewhere, either a blog, the wiki, or a custom news app. The
enlightenment site has a news feed, but it's fairly simplistic. It
would be nice to have something that can separate the streams
(announcements, users, developers) and tag articles. The wiki could
potentially be used, but wiki's are not particularly good at storing
transient articles nor tagging them. These articles are useful for a
year maybe, but in time they become obsolete. A blog system really
makes the most sense to me.
Once you have a blog application, I don't see the need for Twitter.
Essentially, each tweet is like the RSS summary to an article that
you're going to link to in the tweet. Just following the RSS feed of
the blog has the same effect. The only benefit I see to twitter is in
knowing how many followers you have. But you could just use web
analytics software on your blog application if you're really interested
in this.
As far as the Twitter "pros". Articles will always need a short
effective summary, this is usually less than 140 characters anyway, not
because the author was limited to some arbitrary number of characters,
but because the purpose of the summary is to be a short sentence that
tells readers what is in the article. Looking at edevel on Twitter,
there is a lack of professionalism. There are too many tweets that I'm
not interested in and many tweets seem more conversational than
informative. Although greater accessibility is generally a good thing,
being able to update the articles from a mobile phone will probably lead
to lower quality journalism than you would otherwise have.
Last I want to compare some information feeds. Here's the current
edevel twitter feed and a few other project feeds I follow:
http://twitter.com/edevel
http://blog.songbirdnest.com/
http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/
http://dojotoolkit.org/taxonomy/term/29/0
Notice that the twitter feed more resembles mailing lists than a good
source of news and articles. You'll notice that the songbird site has a
twitter feed on the right side, which also seems more like a
conversation between people than a source of news articles.
Maybe the difference is just in the granularity of detail. At the most
verbose level you have IRC and the mailing lists. Some people follow
these sources and highlight things on twitter. Other people will follow
any of the three sources and then write higher quality articles on the
blog or create wiki pages summarizing changes. Other articles will come
from developers who want to summarize and publish their work.
So I'll just conclude by saying that for me and other users/developers
who want to follow the big events in the enlightenment world Twitter
doesn't seem to be the right tool. It shares the problems IRC and the
mailing lists have of having too much information flyby. I would prefer
to follow a source that has a few high quality articles and news updates
a week. Not something like twitter with 10 tweets a day. I don't think
there's anything wrong with using Twitter as an additional communication
tool. I just think that what you really want is a better blog with more
authors.
If no one has the energy/time to compare blog application tools and
install one on the website I would be interested in doing so. Just tell
me if you want me to look into it.
-Arlo
Michael Jennings wrote:
On Wednesday, 13 May 2009, at 13:38:30 (+0200),
Thomas Gst?dtner wrote:
Why waste time and ressources for such a useless service that
doesn't have any advantage over anything else, instead of
maintaining a official information source on e.org with 1) no 140
char limit 2) more professionalism 3) a more official character 4) a
proper standard to get the news (RSS) 5) far better usability. I
really can't understand why every new hype has to be adopted while
the official sources are hardly maintained at all.
1. The 140-character limit is fairly soft, and it keeps things to
digestible chunks with links to the details.
2. If you think there is a lack of professionals on Twitter, you
clearly haven't used it.
3. I
