Distrowatch collects all this stuff automatically. Maybe we can just link to it.
I am the person who did it for multiple releases. It eventually got to
the point where it was too low of a priority for me to do, when I had
multiple jobs (FPL, program manager).
My main gripes with this are:
* OMG, pain in the butt. Seriously. Wiki tables aren't awesome fun;
we are collecting the title, the link, the author, the date (not the
date it posted to the list, but the publication date), the language.
That's a lot of back and forth between multiple windows of cut and
pasting. Not to sound like a wuss, but when I did these in batches,
it would normally take me a number of hours to go through 10-20 posts.
* Return on investment. We collect the articles .... and ??? We never
did follow-up, except for the instances where someone would say
something horribly wrong or incorrect in an article and someone would
generally reach out to the author and try to correct them. Ideally,
we'd take the list of people and make sure they were all on a press
list for release time, or do something like count the number of news
postings we'd get on a release day, and use that as a benchmark for
the next release to measure if we were getting more press, less press,
etc. Or identify reasons/causes of attracting press attention,
outside of releases, and fine-tune our outreach. But we don't do
anything right now, except still the occasional "correct the author's
misinformation" type of thing, so going through and manually
collecting things is hard.
In my dream universe, I've always wanted to see a simple web tool
where someone - instead of cutting/pasting into an email - could
cut/paste into a small web app where they could put the title, date,
author, etc. and then it would automagically post that in pretty table
format to a wiki. Encouraging people to do the wiki entry on their
own when doing an in-the-news posting to the mailing list didn't yield
many results, and making it a requirement I suspect would just cut
down on the number of notifications we receive. I am a fan of dead
simple and this, while sort of dead simple, assuming you know how to
use wiki tables, still sucks in terms of time/window swapping/omg i
forgot the extra bracket and it hosed my whole page/omg i closed the
window accidentally after entering 4 articles (though this is far less
of a problem now with the reopen closed tab thing, but when that
wasn't around, omg, I wanted to stab little kittens when I did that).
One other thing to consider is that nowadays, there's a fine line
between "news by people who write news articles for news sites" and
"random blog posts/reviews of Fedora on personal blogs" - we often mix
both of these into this list, and though sometimes they'll qualify as
both, or someone's blog post will be so controversial it is news in
and of itself... I don't really consider the latter to be a "news"
type of thing, though perhaps the collection of reviews on its own
might merit some sort of other scrutiny. I could definitely see
someone going through non-news blog reviews and doing a round-up of
the most common review points/feedback/perceptions that we are seeing
from people, and seeing if there was a way to pass that feedback along
somehow (to fesco, or I don't know who.)
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