Re: news.gnome.org

[Thilo Pfennig <tp pfennigsolutions de>]

Another point I like to discuss is - and that relates to the sorts of
NEWS, of what actually is GNOME News, which appears on
www.gnome.org/indes.html:

Right now there are only a few entries under "Latest News". But if one
would think selecting [News] in the tilebar gives you more of the same -
it does not. Also neither is "Latest News" selectable or is there a
"Read more news..." at the bottom of this part.

I think there should be one feed of news which is what also is being
displayed on the front page. And this should be rather a selection of
official GNOME News (like the http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/ )

This is not a simple question, but nonetheless an important one.

My suggestion would be to also migrate www.gnome.org/press/releases/ to
a blog (but rather to news.gnome.org/pressreleases or so) ASAP as a
first step. AFAIK news.gnome.org is not planned to run with Plone? What
would be important is to present users things like tag cluds, so they
can fish for the content they are looking for in news.gnome.org and
press releases, also. Some thoughts should go into what categories and
tags are chosen.

Another problem with syndicated content is that each source will have
different conten licenses. Also if you link to outside sources you are
actually loosing visitors. So I think news.gnome.org should work more on
content it owns and can choose the license it wishes. The current site
states that the content listes above is copyrighted by the GNOME
project, while linked blog entries like
http://www.lbtechservices.com/blog/2007/09/27/future-of-lat/ explicitly
state: "© 2008, Loren Bandiera’s weblog. All Rights Reserved."

 I suggest adding at least an explanation that the actual entries have a
copyright according to the policy of the aggregated blogs.

It would also make sense to have an official policy which content
policies are ok for news.gnome.org. I am not a lawyer, but how should
one deal with aggregated content with a strict copyright? On the one
hand it is aggregateable and free accessible on the net - but on the
other hand an author states that it may not be copied without his
affirmation. I guess this  could be dealt with by requiring and
archiving the affirmation. That is another reason why ot would be better
to have GNOME owned or freely licensed content on every GNOME main page
- and to only show titles of news/blog entries for all outside content.
That's not just nit-picking but having a clear policy would make it
easier for maintainers of the sites to determine what is right or wrong
and to be able to act without having to check back with anybody else,
which would otherwise be adviseable.

I havent read of any official policy yet. Is there any?


Regards,
Thilo