[R] Announcing a new R news site: R-bloggers.com

Tue Dec 8 18:24:34 CET 2009

I am not sure if its still the case but one of the problems with the
Planet R feed was that it had material in it not related to R or
statistics or any technical subject at all so if you harvest it be
sure to exclude such sources.

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 12:12 PM, Elijah Wright <elijah.wright at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Tal!
>
> First let me say that I deeply appreciate the work that you're putting into
> this.  You're doing good things for our community, and that's great!
>
> I put the planet-R stuff together rather hastily a few years ago, as a way
> of seeing whether it was of enough use for the community for
> it to be something that the R project would want to provide as a standard
> service offering.  ;)  At that moment in time, it seemed like a
> slightly fringe thing to do, but I think the community has grown into it a
> bit now.  There are a *lot* more R-related RSS feeds in the
> ecosystem now than there were a couple or three years back.
>
> Another aspect - a couple of years ago, we didn't have decent recommenders
> for related feeds from things like Google Reader.  Nowadays,
> once google finds an R-related feed, it starts to suggest it to me.  That's
> very powerful, and I think the need for a centralized "planet"-style
> site is somewhat reduced by it.
>
> I'd strongly suggest that you make your site as community-oriented as
> possible, probably by asking folks in the
> community (like, say, Romain...) to help you run and administer the thing.
> That will make it more like a community project, and
> reduce the load on you personally.  I should have done something like that
> with the planetr.stderr.org site long ago - as Dirk notes,
> my cycle time for responding to mail and notes is a bit slow, and my time
> budget for messing about with the site is also pretty amazingly limited.
>
> As you note - there's not really much by way of contact information in the
> planetr templates.  They're quite limited and quite unimpressive.  :)  But,
> well, the amount of work that was required to get a "working" site up was
> also incredibly small for me.
>
> I'd be happy to see you harvest links out of planetr.stderr.org and add them
> to your r-bloggers site - some of the links I've collected there are
> institutional (journal feeds and the like) and should be possible to add
> without any consultation.  For the individual bloggers, I'd suggest
> contacting them to get permission to add their feeds - it just seems like
> the polite thing to do.
>
> Again, I want to thank you publicly for spending your time on this, and am
> happy to see someone taking action to improve communication
> and discussion across the R community of users and developers.  This
> benefits us all, greatly!
>
> Best, and be well,
>
> --elijah
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Dirk,
>>
>> I wish to emphasis that I came across PlanetR over a year ago,
>> but completely forgot it existed when working on R-bloggers. Also, when I
>> contacted the bloggers about this idea, non of them actually wrote to me
>> about it (which makes me feel better about not remembering it). I apologies
>> if setting up R-bloggers seems like trying to "compete" with PlanetR, this
>> at all wasn't my intention.
>> Yet, now that my website is up, I hope it will be of use and here
>> are several ways in which (at hindsight) I can say it has something to
>> offer:
>>
>> 1) Planet R is limited (for years) to 26 feeds only, and I don't remember
>> seeing it evolve to include (or allow inclusion) of new R blogs that came
>> around.
>> 2) The feeds are of blogs and non blogs (such as wiki or cran updates).
>> That
>> makes finding "reading material" inside it very difficult, since the site
>> is
>> cluttered with a lot of "updates" from cranbarries and the wiki.
>> 3) In PlanetR, one can only view (about) 5 days back and no more
>> (R-bloggers
>> allows viewing of much more then 5 days back).
>> 4) R-bloggers allows searching inside the content, PlanetR doesn't.
>> 5) R-bloggers allow one to get e-mail updates, PlanetR doesn't.
>> 6) R-bloggers offers "related articles", PlanetR doesn't.
>>
>> I see R-bloggers <http://www.r-bloggers.com/> as a "news site" based on
>> the
>> R bloggers, and I can't say the same about PlanetR for the reasons I gave
>> above.
>>
>>
>> With much respect to you Dirk,
>> Tal
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----------------Contact
>> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
>> Contact me: Tal.Galili at gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
>> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
>> www.r-statistics.com/ (English)
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 9:59 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > On 5 December 2009 at 21:38, Tal Galili wrote:
>> > | R-Bloggers.com hopes to serve the R community by presenting (in one
>> > place)
>> > | all the new articles (posts) written (in English) about R in the "R
>> > | blogosphere".
>> >
>> > But how is that different from
>> >
>> >      http://PlanetR.stderr.org
>> >
>> > which has been doing the same quite admirably for years?
>> >
>> > Dirk
>> >
>> > --
>> > Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
>> >
>>
>>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>