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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.

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:

Community: WOMWorld-organised meetups in Toronto & Vancouver postponed (now in May) http://bit.ly/bGfuBR
Devices: N900 to launch in Hong Kong http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...772#post624772
Devel: MeeGo Repository "Working Group" next steps http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/mee...il/001700.html
Wild: Using N900 on the road for business http://senseapplied.com/index.php/no...ess-companion/
Apps: Telescope is Maemo5-style task switcher for N8x0 http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=50689

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

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....

Re: Maemo Weekly News needs more contributors

Quote:

Originally Posted by sygys (Post 628083)

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.