Planet Humanism: feedback and filtering

16 September 2007

Now that Planet Humanism has been running for a few months, I’m asking both readers and contributors their opinions as to how Planet Humanism works for them: how useful they find it, how interesting they find the posts, or just any other comments or suggestions for improving Planet Humanism for everyone. I’d love to hear from you and find out what you think. Please feel free to drop a comment in reply to this post.

Secondly, some of the feedback that I’ve had already received concerned posts from contributors that weren’t obviously humanism related; basically an issue of signal-to-noise.

To an extent, I agree with this, but Planet Humanism was set up not just as a collection of humanism related blog posts, but also as a collection of posts by humanists, a subtle but distinct difference, and I don’t really want to change this policy.

Personally, I prefer to exclude most of my non-humanist related posts from PH, as some have nothing to do with humanism per se, and to this end I now filter my FeedBurner feed through Yahoo! Pipes to only include posts that I choose to tag with “humanist”, “humanism” and, of course, “planethumanism.com”. These may change in future, and if so, I can easily update the pipe myself.

So, if contributors with more generic blogs (as mine is) would like to change their feed to a filtered version to include only those posts with a humanist focus, then feel free to either email me the URL of your new (filtered) feed, or let me know what tags or category labels you would/do use for filtering, and I’ll set up a Yahoo! Pipes filter for you.

Oh, and one more thing… if you know of a great humanistic blog, please let me know about it so that I can send them an invitation to join the party. Or feel free to send them in our direction so that they can check out Planet Humanism for themselves. :-)

Thanks!

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Tags: feedback, humanism, Planet Humanism, web

Comments

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3436 Responses2007-09-16+22%3A21%3A23nullifidian to “Planet Humanism: feedback and filtering”

uk on September 17th, 2007 5:30 am

To enhance usability, I would add an About section to the right-hand nav bar, which has a link to a page that explains the purpose of this site. This is my first time visiting and it took me a while to understand what the site is all about. Actually, I’m still looking.
TW on September 17th, 2007 9:05 pm

I like PH and read it daily, along with PA it is a good source of blogs I might otherwise miss.

To a small extent there is the risk PH (and PA) are “stealing” traffic from the actual blogs, but generally if I like an article I will still go to visit the original blog (not sure if it helps but part of me hopes the blog owner will check their stats and see a post was popular!). Also, as most blogs on PA/PH are not advert supported I dont know how much of an issue this is – the only thing I can think of is the “feel good” factor of getting hits on your blog.

As to the filtering thing – it is not something I would advocate.

Personally, I like reading generic posts by people with a shared interest. If every post on PA was about atheism and every post on PH discussed “humanist” topics, for me, it would get boring fast. The benefit I get from reading PH/PA is that it makes me aware of things as diverse as books and films to social thought that might never have crossed my mind and it is promoted by people with whom I have at least one other shared interest. There is only a finite amount of new “humanist” or “atheistic” topics…

I am aware that I might be in a minority opinion though.
AV on September 23rd, 2007 12:50 am

I haven’t heard of PH before, Null . . . I must check it out.
nullifidian on September 26th, 2007 12:40 pm

uk: This has been planned for a while, and I hope to get something up later tonight, and a few other bits and pieces. Thanks for the reminder.

TW: I’m not sure I agree that there’s really the risk that you mention. As with PA, PH operates on a “at your request” principle, so any traffic “lost” to a blog is going to be because they’ve asked to be featured. If people want, they’re free to adjust their feeds to offer a summary of the post, rather than the full post.

I understand and appreciate your thoughts about having non-filtered posts. I don’t plan to change this to a requirement for inclusion, but it’s an option for those that are more comfortable with it (for whatever reason, not least of which might be blogs with multiple authors). It might gratify you to know that so far there are only two blogs that filter their posts, the rest are full blog feeds. :-)

AV: I’ve obviously not been pimping it enough. ;-) Feel free to do so if you find it useful!
TW on September 27th, 2007 4:30 pm

Null, it would be boring if you agreed with me on everything I said :-)

When I was talking about the “lost” traffic, I don’t think I explained myself very well. I dont mean that people will lose traffic without knowing about it. I was trying to mention a reason that some people wont like adding their feeds to the service. PA/PH provide a great way to increase visibility of a blog, but if the blog is one which tries to generate income (eg. through google ads or whatever) then the feeds are not all that beneficial. As you rightly say, this can be mitigated by sending a partial feed.

As for the varied topics – I still prefer them! Imagine if all PZ Myers ever talked about was evolutionary biology…

Anyway, keep PH going strong!
Challenge Religion - Today’s Top Blog Posts on Atheism - Powered by SocialRank on October 1st, 2007 10:10 am

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