Using identi.ca for Ubuntu stuff.
Mike Basinger (@technoviking) sent me a mail asking about how we can use identi.ca and/or laconica for Ubuntu-related things, since a good number of community members have been joining identi.ca and using it. We started talking and as we brainstormed ideas on how to use it more and more people came up with some great ideas, so we wrote them all down.
Nick Ali (@boredandblogging) reserved some Ubuntu-related names for what we might use in the future. This afternoon while taking a break from cleaning (heh) I started up what will be the first of hopefully more-to-come identi.ca accounts for people to follow:
Introducing @ubuntunews!
Currently I am using the excellent twitterfeed to feed certain RSS feeds into this account so you can just follow it and get a good cross section of what's going on in the Ubuntu world. Right now by subscribing to @ubuntunews you get The Fridge, QA/Brainstorm Blog, the Canonical Blog, Ubuntu website news, Ubuntu Screencasts, and the Ubuntu-UK and Fresh Ubuntu podcast feeds. I am currently working on getting a feed working for the YouTube Developer Channel.
So you can either bookmark that page or use an identi.ca client like gwibber to follow along. We have other identi.ca accounts for other things (stay tuned!) but this one was the easiest to deploy, since it's just RSS feeds, so please follow along and let me know if it's useful, if you have any ideas for how to use more microblogging for Ubuntu then please check out the wiki page.
For me these are similar ideas to those that came out when the Fridge was introduced. It may be that the Fridge isn't fulfilling that role properly right now, but I think that putting work into another site is unnecessarily adding another site to the already burgeoning list of sites to follow for those interested in Ubuntu.
Can't we provide this "microblogging" functionality through the Fridge?
Posted by: Matthew East | August 30, 2008 at 18:12
Actually I was thinking adding this as a sidebar to the fridge would be awesome.
Posted by: jorge | August 30, 2008 at 18:38
Maybe it's just me but I think using twitterfeed is an awful abuse of microblogging, as it takes the whole personal connection aspect away from it.
Someone tweeting "I just upped a podcast" or "published an article" or "just released x" is very different and welcomes @ replies versus a duplicate of the same RSS feeds we are free to subscribe to.
If you want more Ubuntu presence on identi.ca that's great but spamming RSS feeds is not the way to go about it.
Posted by: Wade Menard | August 31, 2008 at 00:01
"Actually I was thinking adding this as a sidebar to the fridge would be awesome."
Yes, that's the sort of thing I meant. But it isn't necessary to use another website to do that, the Fridge should be able to aggregate rss feeds already.
Posted by: Matthew East | August 31, 2008 at 05:31
Being an avid identi.ca user, I welcome the introduction of ubuntunews even if it is just a bot. It would be awesome if someone from the Ubuntu community who is interested in identi.ca can personally participate in the discussions once in a while. I enjoy the microblogs of Ryan from ArsTechnica for example.
A separate instance of laconi.ca can also be installed specifically for the Ubuntu community members.
Posted by: tabrez | September 01, 2008 at 03:35