Hello Elijah,
You could have not made me happier with your letter.
It is a very satisfying compliment for me to be appreciated in general, and
specifically by you.


I will start by responding to the simpler parts of your e-mail and the
proceed into the more interesting parts.
My response grew to be quite long, though I tried to remain fresh. I hope it
turned out ok.


First, thank you for the historical context of PlanetR and also for putting
it up in the first place. I already took some steps as to contact people in
the PlanetR list, but not all have responded to me.

Now regarding the more general (implicit) questions that come up from your
letter and from Dirk's: what is the purpose of R-bloggers.com and of that of
PlanetR (especially when services like Goggle reader and other such sources
are abundant).

For me there are two audiences:
One is that of the web 2.0 power users. That is, people who know what RSS is
and use it, maybe evern write their own blogs. These people have only one
problem (as I see it) that R-bloggers tries to solve, and that is to know
who else lives in their ecosystem. Who else they should follow.
For that, google reader recommendation system is great, but not enough. A
much better system is if there was a one place where all R bloggers would
go, write down their website, and all of us would know they exist. That is
what R-bloggers offers for the power users. I think this is also why over 20
of them subscribed to the site RSS feed.
BTW, The origin of this idea came to me when I was trying to find all the
dance bloggers for my wife (who is a dance researcher and blogger herself).
After a while we started http://www.dancebloggers.com/ while knowing of only
10 bloggers. They list now has over 80 bloggers, most of which we would have
not known about without this hub.
The same thing I am trying to do for the R community, that is way I hope
more R bloggers would write about the service - so their network of readers
which includes other R bloggers would add themselves and we will all know
about them.
If that was my only purpose, a simple directory would have been enough. But
I also have a second one and that is to help the second audience.

The second audience I am thinking of are people of our community who are not
so much early adopters (and actually quite late adapters) of the new
facilities that the new web (a.k.a: web 2.0) provides.
To them the all RSS thing is too much to look at, and they are used to
e-mails. And because of that they are (until now) disconected from many of
the R bloggers out there, simply because it is in-efficient for them to go
through all these blogs each day (or even week). So for them, to see all the
content in one place (and even get an e-mail about it) would be (I hope) a
service. I believe that's why 5 of them (so far) has subscribed via e-mail.
I also hope teachers will direct their students to this as a resource for
getting a sense of what people who are using R are doing.
Another thing that hints me about the R community is seeing how the
"facebook fan box" is still empty. Which tells me that (sadly) very few R
users are actively using facebook as a means for connecting with the outer
networks of people out there.

All I wrote also explains why R-bloggers will only take feeds of bloggers
and only (as much as can be said) their posts that are centered around
R  (hence the website name :) ).
It both follows what Gabor talked about - having a site who's content is
only about R. But also what I wish, which is to have "content" in the sense
of articles to read (mostly). And not so much things like news feeds of
wikipedia or new packages published.


Regarding what you suggested of turning the site into being more of a
community enterprise, I don't see how to do that. Right now, the adding of
the feeds is a very simple process and the rate of people adding themselves
is very low, so I don't think I will need help in that. I would more love to
see more people in our community becoming even more social online, but I
don't thing that R bloggers <http://www.r-bloggers.com/>should be the place
for that but rather it should be on each of the blogs that write about R.
And also on services like http://crantastic.org/ which I really hope will
somehow be pushed more by the R core team so to serve all of us with more
input from the R community of users.

I hope this was at least an interesting read for some of you :)
And Elijah, *thanks again* for your kind words!
Best regards,
Tal







----------------Contact
Details:-------------------------------------------------------
Contact me: Tal.Galili@gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
www.r-statistics.com/ (English)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Elijah Wright <elijah.wright@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@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@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@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]]
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help@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.
>>
>
>

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