It was really interesting for me, to read the discussion about the future of the Ubuntu Planet. The first thing is that I am a new Ubuntu Member with the ability to post to the planet. I do not blog regular, so I did not know if I will use the ability to post to this planet. As you see, this is at least my second blog post on the Ubuntu Planet.
Personally I did not read the Ubuntu Planet at all before I finished my application for the Ubuntu membership. After that I added the planet to my feed reader and started reading.
Except this planet, I am reading the planet at planet.ubuntuusers.de in German. As the member of the „Ikhayateam“ of ubuntuusers.de, which writes articles and controls the planet, I regularly check the planet. Over there, we (the team) had many discussions which blog posts we want to see in the planet. We also focused what our users want to read. Consequently we defined some rules. You can find the full rules in our Wiki.
The rules are divided into three parts: „acceptance criteria“, „code of conduct“ and „violation of the rules“. As we do not have anything similar to the Ubuntu membership program over there, the blogs must meet the acceptance criteria. Currently we have nine criteria. Each blogger has to apply to get the chance to publish their blog posts to the ubuntuusers planet. We only accept Open-Source, Ubuntu- and Linux-related blog posts. Private or off-topic blog posts are not allowed. Additionally we want a specific tag or feed for the planet. This could be something like an ubuntuusers-tag or simply an ubuntu-tag. The article must contain the full article, and it is not allowed to include any ads or links to commercial products. As we are a German website, we only allow German blog posts. Also we do not want to have any nonactive members, the blog must exist for at least two months. We regularly check if the blogs are active. Nonactive blogs get a message and may be removed, if the stop blogging.
The above text contains the main rules of the planet. While some readers like this rules, some readers does not like it. This does also apply to the bloggers. The most of the times the bloggers follow our rules. There are not many blog posts which we need to remove. In the last six months there were not more than five invalid posts, which we hide afterwards.
Some bloggers did not like our rules, so there was one guy who started his own (kind of) planet. OSBN.de (Open Source Blog Network) is the name of that planet. It also has a few rules, but it is less strict than the rules of the ubuntuusers planet.
I personally do not think this rules should be applied in a way comparable to the Ubuntu Planet. Personally I prefer Ubuntu-, Linux- and Open-Source-related blog articles. I generally agree with Jono and Randall.
I am a new Ubuntu member with the possibility to post articles to this planet. Funnily I do not have the possibility to publish my blog posts to the ubuntuusers.de-Planet, because I do not blog regular enough, to get accepted. In my case I will mainly blog about my LoCo Activities in Germany if this is interesting for the Ubuntu planet.
With this article I mostly wanted to show you, how we at ubuntuusers.de are handling the planet and which content we want to see. Maybe this should give some of you some ideas what you should blog and what not.