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In the open source world blogs are one of the main vehicles for general discussions about technical and project issues. One of the main reasons for this is that open source projects are interconnected, and developers working on one project want to follow what is happening in other projects. Users also like to know what is happening behind the scenes with their favourite software. Blogging is a great way to reach new people who share similar interests to you. Sites like http://digg.com, http://slashdot.org, and others facilitate this.
The volume of blog postings created within a community can be overwhelming. To help deal with this, RSS or Atom feeds enable the receipt of content in a machine-readable format so that the content can be used in a variety of different ways (for example, in Firefox [http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html Live Bookmarks], through a service such as [http://www.google.com/reader Google Reader], or in a program such as [http://liferea.sourceforge.net/ Lifrea] or [http://www.feedreader.com/ FeedReader]).
Many open-source community maintain a [http://planetplanet.org Planet] site which aggregates the feeds from community members into a single page (and the Planet, in turn, provides an aggregated feed). The Mozilla planet is at http://planet.mozilla.org -- other open source planets include http://planet.gnome.org and http://planet.fedoraproject.org.
=Blogs in DPS909/OSD600=
You are required to blog '''twice''' per week on things related to the course, your project, your readings, etc. If you haven't blogged before, spend some time reading other people's blogs. You can read the Mozilla blogs on http://planet.mozilla.org.
You are also encouraged to comment on other people's blog posts when you have something to say in reply. Blog comments allow two way communication, and help blog authors understand how their views are being received.