Currently http://maemo.org/news aggregates sources that are basically relevant to developers. This means that, after the community editorial of loves and hates, most of the news reaching http://maemo.org homepage are developer oriented as well.

How to change this?

And what's more, how to change this without loosing the current (good) level of news for developers?

Some ideas:

- Everybody here go to http://maemo.org/news and love the news you like. We will get developer oriented news if developers and power users are the only ones rating those news.

- Split Announcements in Developer announcements (the current ones) and Community announcements (channeled by the Council), being the latter the ones appearing in the homepage. Developers can always subscribe to the specific feed for developer announcements.

- Open the http://planet.maemo.org to more end user oriented blogs. Or actually split the Planet asking bloggers to have a tag/category for generic posts interesting to anybody and developer oriented posts. Yes, sometimes both are mixed and then they can use both categories/tags.

- Create a way to promote ITt/tmo threads to http://maemo.org/news - so they can be promoted to the top headlines from there.

- maemo.nokia.com will have also news targeting end users, and we could aggregate them.

Share your ideas!

Even if we need to add more non-developers as sources of news (through blogs and ITt threads), there is more that can be done pushing certain types of news written by developers that are interesting to end users: software releases.

Currently the news coming from garage projects are basically ignored since most people rating news seem to follow the planet only + announcements.

Looking now at Latest Items at http://maemo.org/news/ we can find

PyFinancial Calculator v0.0.3

Fuelpad 0.82 released

Note also http://maemo.org/downloads/updated/OS2008/25/ which could be also a source for news. Developers already have a field to explain what is contained in the new release. With a checkbox they could decide whether this is a release worth top go to the News page.

Note also that even in the Planet there is a decent % of posts that are not only interesting for developers. The onyl thing is that they don't get as much love as the cool novelties related with development... But YOU non-developer could change that just by going there and support the news you like.

Even if we need to add more non-developers as sources of news (through blogs and ITt threads), there is more that can be done pushing certain types of news written by developers that are interesting to end users: software releases.

Currently the news coming from garage projects are basically ignored since most people rating news seem to follow the planet only + announcements.

Looking now at Latest Items at http://maemo.org/news/ we can find

PyFinancial Calculator v0.0.3

Fuelpad 0.82 released

Note also http://maemo.org/downloads/updated/OS2008/25/ which could be also a source for news. Developers already have a field to explain what is contained in the new release. With a checkbox they could decide whether this is a release worth top go to the News page.

Note also that even in the Planet there is a decent % of posts that are not only interesting for developers. The onyl thing is that they don't get as much love as the cool novelties related with development... But YOU non-developer could change that just by going there and support the news you like.

I'm thinking we may have four categories:

New users
Typical users
Power users
Developers

I think each of those groups are interested in different things. What if each item were preceded by a row of four circles, with a circle colored in for each group to which the item pertained? And a reader could also click to hide or show those items pertinent to the group with which he/she self-identified.

I'm not sure there's a clear cut distinction between "developer" and "non-developer" topics; there are certainly low-level posts on Tracker and email metadata which are more interesting to developers, but these don't get the ratings that "cool new app released, here's a demo" do.

The biggest suggestion I can make - for someone eager to make a mark on the community - would be to do regular in-depth reviews of applications - specifically focusing on new ones, but any old gems as well.

As for garage news, the "Fresh" feed of apps on newstyle should mean that the garage announcements aren't necessary (and, given they're typically fairly low quality, that's probably a good thing).

In other words, I think it's just a case of someone wanting to write about topics which will be widely read - I think the system as is will promote those appropriately. If someone needs a place to write such articles, maddler's maemopeople.org blog service is available.