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Attn lazyweb:

I want a software blog.


I want it to tell me about neat things that I should be running in
Linux, primarily, and maybe also about neat things on other platforms.
It should definitely be about open-source software.


It needs to represent a lot of voices, and not be a column written
by one person. So it could be a LiveJournal community, maybe, or it
could be a collaborative site like use Perl but about
software.


It has to have reader comments, because the best way things like this can work
is for people to post “Sure, that’s neat, but I wish it did FOO”, and
then “Oh, BAR is a program like this one that also does FOO”, and so on.


Sweetcode is almost what I want, but its editorial stance
aims a bit too much for the esoteric. There isn’t a great deal of
practical esoteric software, which is probably why sweetcode gets a new
post every few months. This is why it needs to be a community effort;
if one person posting had the sweetcode editor’s taste in software
it wouldn’t be overwhelming because other people’s tastes would
balance it out.


VersionTracker is almost
what I want, except it’s more of a repository and less of a showcase,
and it tries to accomplish too much, and it’s oriented towards OS X
rather than Linux.


Freshmeat is almost what I want, but it doesn’t have an
editor, so it’s hard to pick out the neat bits from the sheer volume.


Does anyone know if such a thing exists?


Does anyone else think that something like that would be worth reading?
Worth contributing to?

Rich

8 responses to “Attn lazyweb:”

  3. Aren’t you describing a LUG mailing list? Or what they used to be, before there was Google or Slashdot or Freshmeat or other sources of robo-news?

    I miss those sorts of groups — there was a sense of a shared project.

    I think it could be great as long as you somehow ensure everyone on the list has a similar enough world-view and definition of ‘interesting’. Invitation-only?

  4. No, it needs to be bloglike. Something you can go and look at every day to see what new software someone’s written about today.

  6. I would certainly read it and contribute with comments. I am not sure I would contribute with articles our source posts unless “articles” consisted of not much more than “Hey, you all should check out the latest Freevo. It lets you play MAME ROMs now.”

  7. Yeah, that’s basically what I’m figuring for articles/posts.

    The more I think about it the more I think I want sweetcode but successful, and I think sweetcode failed in a few ways:

    • only one person posting
    • the “interesting” bar set too high
    • no place for users to talk about the software

    Strongly considering doing it now.