Dot readership

Hi all,

A while ago I asked for comments from readers of the dot. There was a lot of valuable feedback which was noted by the dot editors and I'd like to summarize some of the findings. The dot team has unfortunately been quite busy with Real Life (TM) lately so we haven't had much chance of discussing the results yet but some things are already under way.

Ideas and feedback

• Introduce a Like button - status: To be discussed


• Pace of articles - OK, so we keep the speed at 1 article/day


• More technical content like the famous 'Pillars of KDE 4' series by Troy - though one. The dot depends on YOU for content, at least to a large extend. While the promo team writes articles like interviews and reports from meetings, we often lack the technical skills/knowledge to really write about what's upcoming. We might be able to do something like a weekly report on what has been on the planet in terms of upcoming things, but otherwise - we need help from developers or interested users who follow eg mailinglists and commit logs to write about development. Of course kde-promo and the dot editors are more than happy to help with that - even a braindump is often plenty for us to go with and churn out a good article. So send us stuff, please!


• Allow anonymous comments - working on that. The amount of spam is an issue here but the sysadmin team works on improving the dot to handle it easier and a few dot editors have stepped up to moderate a bit more. But people also mention they go to the KDE forums to discuss articles. Fine with us. FYI, the articles are put on the news section of the forums here. You don't seem to be able to post comments there, however.


• Introduce or preview apps - like the technical content, it would need a bit more input from the community. If you've seen a new app, let us know! Especially if you have time for a short writeup (again, we fix Spanglish, Germanglish and other language abuse all the time, it's OK if you don't write so well).


• Bring the commit digest back! - Oh yeah. We want that as much as you all do. Danny has been working on a webinterface to 'crowdsource' the work, and we hope at some point he'll be able to finish this so we can move on this. EDIT Danny has blogged that he's indeed going to do this hopefully asap! EDIT2 and now his pretty blog design also works in Chromium ;-)


• OpenID from KDE - don't count on that. It is a lot of work to be an OpenID provider, and the KDE sysadmins don't seem to feel like doing that work. It's not really our place anyway. But there is work on having a single logon system in all KDE infrastructure, which should alleviate the pain a bit.


• Articles from the dot on planet KDE - not a bad idea at all. It's under discussion now ;-)


• Articles about the vision and future of KDE - yes. Good one. The discussion about that is often happening on Planet KDE, but could also be summarized on the dot. I call on those leading that discussion to think about posting their thoughts to the dot once in a while! And hopefully somebody reading this feels like summarizing the discussion for the dot every now and then ;-)


• OpenID more prominently - under discussion ;-)


• I can help! - Good! We need two types of help: editing/reviewing (= become a cool dot editor. Just mail dot-editors on kdeorg for info); and writing of articles (contact kde-promo on kdeorg or me or dot-editors).

And in generaly most commenters said they love the dot. We as dot editors like that ;-)

the dot matters!

News from the dot is picked up by quite a few major news sites like LWN.net and (soon) linux.com - so don't underestimate the readership of the dot. Think about that when you write an interesting blog about what has been going on in your app lately, or when you announce something on your blog! These things can easily go on the dot, so contact us a few days in advance so we can schedule things. And yes, you can still blog things you put on the dot, we don't care about being exclusive or anything ;-)

Love,
Jos