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-   -   Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=50994)

Jaffa 2010-04-25 14:13
Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Hi,

MWKN is a weekly news digest for Maemo (with some MeeGo news), however its production is becoming unsustainable. The contributions we're getting are very much appreciated - but there just aren't enough of them! In addition to editing the issue (with GeneralAntilles), I'm having to spend extra time trying to fish out the easy URLs for the issue - we're probably missing some of the buried gems.

If you'd like to see MWKN continue, please consider becoming a contributor. It's not hard: send a message via Twitter (you can get clients embedded in most web browsers) to mwkn with a URL and some keywords.

That's it!

If you'd like to contribute, but need a further incentive, please let me know. Free t-shirts? Advertising revenue sharing? Just a by-line on the articles?

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

PS. Obviously, if you'd like to become a sub-editor as well - and flesh out these links into quotes - that'd be very much appreciated; but the single biggest problem at the moment is getting the breadth and depth of contributions.

Jaffa 2010-04-25 14:15
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
You can see the kind of messages that contributors have to post by looking at MWKN Twitter feed:

stobbsc 2010-04-26 09:28
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
This was a great hack that I thought might have been good to share as it really shows whats possible:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...=copter&page=2

sygys 2010-04-26 09:50
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Can i make a suggestion? First of all the maemo weekly news is hard to read for people that dont speak very good english. The words and phrases that are used are written in geek language.

Next there is almost no relevant news in the weekly update. its always about councils and promoting things. Everything in that weekly news is stuff most people allready heared a week earlier.

Post some freaking news about the PR1.2 where thousands of people are waiting for, then you can make real news. i get a feeling the weekly update is only stuffed with old news just to get it filled up every week. Thats to bad if you ask me. There must be some people over at the maemo community that know far more about the upcomming patch then they tell!

There must be somekind of unofficial way to leak some of that info right?

Well im not reading the weekly updates anyway....

Jinux 2010-04-26 09:59
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by sygys (Post 628083)
Can i make a suggestion? First of all the maemo weekly news is hard to read for people that dont speak very good english. The words and phrases that are used are written in geek language.

Next there is almost no relevant news in the weekly update. its always about councils and promoting things. Everything in that weekly news is stuff most people allready heared a week earlier.

Post some freaking news about the PR1.2 where thousands of people are waiting for, then you can make real news. i get a feeling the weekly update is only stuffed with old news just to get it filled up every week. Thats to bad if you ask me. There must be some people over at the maemo community that know far more about the upcomming patch then they tell!

There must be somekind of unofficial way to leak some of that info right?

Well im not reading the weekly updates anyway....
Calm your tone! How do you expect them to get news on PR1.2? Just because they are Maemo Weekly News doesn't mean they're Nokia employees that can get news directly, they just put together the news they receive - LIKE ANY NEWS ORGANISATION!. I'd like to see you get some news on PR1.2 and then you can criticise! I have no idea how you say the rest of it isn't relevant :confused: All of it is relevant you just don't care to be interested! Fair enough, some of it is MeeGo and not Maemo, but that is still relevant because that's where Meamo is going.

Sidenote to OP: I've signed up to twitter in a bid to contribute :) @Joeasaurus

CrashandDie 2010-04-26 11:27
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Thanks for your reply sygys, however I believe there is some confusion, I'll try to clear it up.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sygys (Post 628083)
Can i make a suggestion? First of all the maemo weekly news is hard to read for people that dont speak very good english. The words and phrases that are used are written in geek language.
Would you have a few examples of this? The people who have been writing MWKN (Jaffa and GeneralAntilles) or proponents of pretty grammar-friendly spelling. I'm not a native and have never had issues with the way things were phrased. Examples on this would definitely be appreciated. Please note, however, that the sentences written in red are quotations, and I don't believe we do any editing of those snippets.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sygys (Post 628083)
Next there is almost no relevant news in the weekly update. its always about councils and promoting things. Everything in that weekly news is stuff most people allready heared a week earlier.
Fair point, but this may come from a misunderstanding of what MWKN is. MWKN is a weekly digest, which means we attempt to summarise what happened during the previous week. The target audience -- mainly but amongst others -- is a branch of people who don't have the time or energy to go through the vast array of different mediums that provide news related to Maemo (and to a lesser extent, MeeGo).

Quote:
Originally Posted by sygys (Post 628083)
Post some freaking news about the PR1.2 where thousands of people are waiting for, then you can make real news. i get a feeling the weekly update is only stuffed with old news just to get it filled up every week. Thats to bad if you ask me. There must be some people over at the maemo community that know far more about the upcomming patch then they tell!
As Jinux already explained, MWKN does not aim at bringing the latest and greatest information the minute it is released. The release of PR1.2 would be one news item; and then what? One news item doesn't bring us a full edition, it springs one big burst of discussion, and then that's it.

Further even, how are we supposed to get that information? Yes, indeed, some members of the forums, and some contributors know more than they say. Some people are probably already running PR1.2 and running tests against it. Why? Because they've learnt to keep their mouth shut, and in some cases, they may even have signed NDAs. Even if we decided to publish information x or y, based on whatever we managed to get, Nokia would immediately stop sharing any kind of information with the community, and if piss them off sufficiently, MWKN would probably get a Cease and Desist within a few days.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sygys (Post 628083)
There must be somekind of unofficial way to leak some of that info right?
Sure, but that kind of behaviour is not something MWKN aims to accomplish. We are not aiming at becoming Engadget. We want to help people, by offering a unified news that encapsulates the complexity of Maemo in a single source, and single medium. People can get it by email, read it on the go in their browser, and hopefully, soon, view it in high comfort in a PDF file.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sygys (Post 628083)
Well im not reading the weekly updates anyway....
Then you're obviously not our targeted audience, but somehow I think we already got that from your initial reply.

Thanks for your reply though.

sygys 2010-04-26 11:45
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by CrashandDie (Post 628179)
Thanks for your reply sygys, however I believe there is some confusion, I'll try to clear it up.



Would you have a few examples of this? The people who have been writing MWKN (Jaffa and GeneralAntilles) or proponents of pretty grammar-friendly spelling. I'm not a native and have never had issues with the way things were phrased. Examples on this would definitely be appreciated. Please note, however, that the sentences written in red are quotations, and I don't believe we do any editing of those snippets.



Fair point, but this may come from a misunderstanding of what MWKN is. MWKN is a weekly digest, which means we attempt to summarise what happened during the previous week. The target audience -- mainly but amongst others -- is a branch of people who don't have the time or energy to go through the vast array of different mediums that provide news related to Maemo (and to a lesser extent, MeeGo).



As Jinux already explained, MWKN does not aim at bringing the latest and greatest information the minute it is released. The release of PR1.2 would be one news item; and then what? One news item doesn't bring us a full edition, it springs one big burst of discussion, and then that's it.

Further even, how are we supposed to get that information? Yes, indeed, some members of the forums, and some contributors know more than they say. Some people are probably already running PR1.2 and running tests against it. Why? Because they've learnt to keep their mouth shut, and in some cases, they may even have signed NDAs. Even if we decided to publish information x or y, based on whatever we managed to get, Nokia would immediately stop sharing any kind of information with the community, and if piss them off sufficiently, MWKN would probably get a Cease and Desist within a few days.



Sure, but that kind of behaviour is not something MWKN aims to accomplish. We are not aiming at becoming Engadget. We want to help people, by offering a unified news that encapsulates the complexity of Maemo in a single source, and single medium. People can get it by email, read it on the go in their browser, and hopefully, soon, view it in high comfort in a PDF file.



Then you're obviously not our targeted audience, but somehow I think we already got that from your initial reply.

Thanks for your reply though.
Thanks for your explaination. Im sorry if i offended any people personally that was not the meaning of my previous post.

And fairly i was wrong about the intention of this weekly update.

Texrat 2010-04-26 14:04
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by sygys (Post 628197)
Thanks for your explaination. Im sorry if i offended any people personally that was not the meaning of my previous post.

And fairly i was wrong about the intention of this weekly update.
Still you raised a fair point: perhaps this should actually be referred to as a Digest rather than News?

I realize that raises some difficulty since MWKN is out there, but maybe worth considering...

jcharpak 2010-04-26 14:25
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Perhaps the real problem is that it appears on Planet Maemo...along with the very news it's trying to digest. Maybe Planet Maemo needs to be tweaked. For instance, I remember complaints about FireFox Mobile news being delivered in a twitter style (a short blurb that tends to say nothing followed by a link that is just a redirection). I thought someone had agreed to eliminate those from Planet Maemo. Furthermore, there have been a lot of posts about "tracker" which for a log time I didn't know what it was (it replaced metacrawler) but those blogs tend to be very technical and often not apparently related to Maemo at all. Frankly I don't want to see a post in planet maemo unless the blog post contains one of the following: 770,800,810,900, extras, meego, maemo, nokia, ovi store.

Bottom line, I don't think Maemo News is really necessary, what we need is a better Planet Maemo. Then, if people don't want to read an article right now, they just keep their Planet rss feed "unread" until they can.

I'm not a big fan of digests in general, I want small chunks I can read or dismiss, leaving interest articles to be read at my convenience. The digest format is actually....less digestible.

geneven 2010-04-26 14:47
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
In order to be relevant and widely read, assuming that is wanted, MWKN should be posted right here, with comments easy to make after each article. Of course an official copy could be kept elsewhere too.

It was interesting that the response to someone saying they didn't read the weekly news was along the lines of "well then, you aren't our target audience."

I would think that if your target audience is composed of those who currently read it, you are unlikely to expand your audience since you are not targeting new readers.

Texrat 2010-04-26 15:10
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by geneven (Post 628375)
In order to be relevant and widely read, assuming that is wanted, MWKN should be posted right here, with comments easy to make after each article. Of course an official copy could be kept elsewhere too.
It's posted under Community here, which makes sense, and comments are allowed by default.

GeneralAntilles 2010-04-26 16:58
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by geneven (Post 628375)
In order to be relevant and widely read, assuming that is wanted, MWKN should be posted right here, with comments easy to make after each article. Of course an official copy could be kept elsewhere too.
As Texrat says, it already is. . . .

Quote:
Originally Posted by geneven (Post 628375)
It was interesting that the response to someone saying they didn't read the weekly news was along the lines of "well then, you aren't our target audience."

I would think that if your target audience is composed of those who currently read it, you are unlikely to expand your audience since you are not targeting new readers.
MWKN's motivation are about as selfish as they come: aggregate Maemo news from all sources (not just blogs as maemo.org/news does) so we don't have to spend time tracking every source for hours a day. If other people find it useful, well, that's just gravy.

The unfortunate part is that it doesn't seem to be working out so well, since just a few people have been finding the news and generating blurbs, it kind of defeats the purpose for them. ;)

GeneralAntilles 2010-04-26 17:00
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by jcharpak (Post 628358)
Perhaps the real problem is that it appears on Planet Maemo...along with the very news it's trying to digest. Maybe Planet Maemo needs to be tweaked.
It sounds like you'd be better off following News than Planet, as this is the filtered version of the Planet feed.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jcharpak (Post 628358)
Bottom line, I don't think Maemo News is really necessary, what we need is a better Planet Maemo. Then, if people don't want to read an article right now, they just keep their Planet rss feed "unread" until they can.
Bottom line, Planet Maemo aggregates only blogs, not Talk, IRC, the mailing lists, Bugzilla, non-Maemo sources, or the wider web as MWKN does.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jcharpak (Post 628358)
I'm not a big fan of digests in general, I want small chunks I can read or dismiss, leaving interest articles to be read at my convenience. The digest format is actually....less digestible.
Which is fine for you, but not everybody agrees. :)

GeneralAntilles 2010-04-26 17:02
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by CrashandDie (Post 628179)
Please note, however, that the sentences written in red are quotations, and I don't believe we do any editing of those snippets.
It depends. Initially, no, now there's a small amount of editing for formating and obvious typos. Grammatically speaking, though, any errors are generally the fault of the source.

Jaffa 2010-04-26 17:25
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Texrat (Post 628343)
Still you raised a fair point: perhaps this should actually be referred to as a Digest rather than News?
It doesn't seem to be a problem for Linux Weekly News (LWN) or Wine Weekly News, though :-/

Similarly, the Maemo world rarely changes so quickly that items which are 6 days old are no longer relevant. Especially since anything which is no longer relevant doesn't make the issue.

Admittedly, I'm playing Devil's Advocate because:

Quote:
I realize that raises some difficulty since MWKN is out there, but maybe worth considering...

Jaffa 2010-04-26 17:33
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by geneven (Post 628375)
It was interesting that the response to someone saying they didn't read the weekly news was along the lines of "well then, you aren't our target audience."
Well, if someone already knows everything which is in the issue, no - there's not a lot of value they can gain. However, they could share that knowledge by contributing the links to the information as they find them!

Similarly, if things are being missed and too much is focused on development issues, or community issues, contribute the links to the application stuff that you think is missing! Or we can introduce a new section (I always fancied "troll of the week" ;-p) for content if it doesn't fit in one of the existing sections.

firstknight 2010-04-27 00:54
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
i am interested to help... jus need some guidance.... i dun wanna start making criticism without first contributing.... =)

craftyguy 2010-04-27 01:30
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Hmm, it would seem that Maemo needs more news to write about ;)

geneven 2010-04-27 01:34
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles (Post 628572)
As Texrat says, it already is. . . .



MWKN's motivation are about as selfish as they come: aggregate Maemo news from all sources (not just blogs as maemo.org/news does) so we don't have to spend time tracking every source for hours a day. If other people find it useful, well, that's just gravy.

The unfortunate part is that it doesn't seem to be working out so well, since just a few people have been finding the news and generating blurbs, it kind of defeats the purpose for them. ;)
I suspect that you (and Texrat) know that by suggesting that articles be posted here for comment, I wasn't suggesting that they be posted where they already are posted.

I had in mind that they be posted in the Talk area.

And the comments are often not "here" by practically any definition. They may be on other sites entirely.

Texrat 2010-04-27 01:41
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by geneven (Post 629185)
I suspect that you (and Texrat) know that by suggesting that articles be posted here for comment, I wasn't suggesting that they be posted where they already are posted.

I had in mind that they be posted in the Talk area.

And the comments are often not "here" by practically any definition. They may be on other sites entirely.
Geneven... WTF?

The articles ARE posted in Talk, under Community as I said. And in that respect of course it's only natural comments are here by definition.

Were we due for another pointless entanglement? I lost track.

CrashandDie 2010-04-27 02:03
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Texrat (Post 629190)
Were we due for another pointless entanglement? I lost track.
Probably. It seems that people aren't even willing to check their facts before saying something these days. That is, unless Geneven is trying to express something else, but just failing to do so?

Geneven, click on this link (same as above), and tell me if this isn't what you are expecting? Would you prefer to see every single item in each edition to be posted in its own thread? Wouldn't that make things unbearably replicational?

FYI, those threads have been posted and stickied since the beginning of MWKN, so I don't know how you could've missed them.

GeneralAntilles 2010-04-27 02:56
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by CrashandDie (Post 629201)
Geneven, click on this link (same as above), and tell me if this isn't what you are expecting? Would you prefer to see every single item in each edition to be posted in its own thread? Wouldn't that make things unbearably replicational?
Not to mention redundant, since many of the stories already come directly from threads here. . . .

Jaffa 2010-04-27 17:17
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by firstknight (Post 629166)
i am interested to help... jus need some guidance.... i dun wanna start making criticism without first contributing.... =)
Thanks. Sign up for a Twitter account if you haven't got one already and (I find it easiest to) post using something like Echofon - integrated directly into your browser.

As you come across interesting links and news stories about Maemo, post to Twitter a message of the form:

Code:
@mwkn section message url
These'll be reviewed and re-posted by the MWKN account and, after a few of them, MWKN will start "following" you and they'll get reposted automatically.

helex 2010-07-24 23:54
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Hmm... I want to contribute Jaffa, but I'm new at twitter (especially only created for mwkn) and I guess I'm to stupid. :(

When I post it it should instantly appear here, or am I wrong? :(

I posted 2 news for mwkn, but booth are not delivered. Please have a look here: twitter.com

Where is my mistake? :(

helex 2010-07-25 08:18
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Oh, slept a night. Now it is there. :D

I guess I was not patient enough. So, I can confirm... Everything works fine with mwkn! ;)

Jaffa 2010-07-25 08:30
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by helex (Post 763663)
When I post it it should instantly appear here, or am I wrong? :(
It's not automatic until you're "accepted" as a contributor, at which point the Twitter mwkn account will "follow" you.

Until then, it's a manual process to review submissions. So, some points:
  • Your text forms the basis of the headline, so focus on clarity.
  • Contributions for stuff other than your own generated news are welcome :-)

Thanks,

Andrew

helex 2010-07-25 09:00
Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaffa (Post 763921)
It's not automatic until you're "accepted" as a contributor, at which point the Twitter mwkn account will "follow" you.

Until then, it's a manual process to review submissions.
Ah, thanks. I missed this part. :o

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaffa (Post 763921)
  • Your text forms the basis of the headline, so focus on clarity.
  • Contributions for stuff other than your own generated news are welcome :-)
Mh, I'm not a Nokia employee and only a small hobby programmer in my spare time. I know I'm not the biggest community contributor and for the big news I'm always to late. :(
As soon as they appear at talk.maemo.org everybody knows about it. But as soon as I have a news nobody else has heard about I will use twitter to let mwkn know. :)


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