Galaxy Galaxy

A good proportion of you will be reading this site via a webpage that is powered by the Planet Planet aggregation software. Now, I’m told that Planet Venus is a better aggregator, but I have no real plans to change.

However, I do have vague plans to change the way it works. As part of my LugRadio marathon (status) I got to an episode where they complain, legitimately, that many planets are simply overrun with posts that are not particularly relevant for the topic. However, as the conversation continues (and the subsequent conversation on hashlugradio) it becomes obvious that there is a great deal of subjectivity of what people want to read on a planet site.

So – here’s the plan for “Galaxy Galaxy” (bigger and better than Planet Planet ) – we create a (thoroughly web 2.0) set of tools that allows for a very customisable planet-type system. This has a number of elements and features:

• Key to this will be plugins for blogging software that provide feeds of the categories/tags that are used on that site
• Likewise the blogging software will need to provide feeds for each of the categories – WordPress already does this
• The “GG” site will be set up to subscribe to particular sites (as they are now) but also which categories are subscribed by default
• Individual readers will be able to select/deselect which categories they actually do want to have feeds from, via a whizzy Ajax-style interface
• Choices will remain persistent (probably through cookies – we don’t really want logins…)

OK – so this may not be a new idea. In fact, it may not even be a good idea. But I would like to hear from anyone who’s interested in developing it

mrBen