New feature: Introducing PlanetMO
April 15, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Well, when bugs bring you trouble, add more functionality! We are happy to announce a new feature on mathblogging.org: PlanetMO!
Recently, I was involved in a discussion on meta.mathoverflow regarding a possible ‘corner’ for discussions close to mathoverflow. The typical example is a question off topic for MO but nevertheless interesting. Where to go to have a discussion? And how to find those discussions?
Among the many tools that were mentioned, an_mo_user (who had started the thread) suggested a ‘Planet Mathoverflow’ similar to Planet Debian, Planet Gnome etc (and not to be confused with the encyclopedia PlanetMath). The idea would be that somebody who is interested in continuing the discussion of a closed question could simply write a blog post, post a link to that post in the comments of the question and moderate the discussion on the blog. Using a suitable tag, this blog post could appear on a Planet-like site. This would solve several problems: the discussion would be clearly away from MO, there would be no need for general moderators since the blogger would be in charge and finally visibility of such discussions would be achieved through the planet.
After checking with Fred and Felix, I offered that we could realize such a PlanetMO on mathblogging.org. Thanks to Felix’s efforts and some co-operative fine tuning we are able to release this new feature into the wild today! On http://www.mathblogging.org/planetMO you can now check out (in full length) posts from bloggers in our database which were tagged with ‘mathoverflow’, ‘MO’ or ‘PlanetMO’ (although there are only a few right now).
We understand if people feel the full length is a little intrusive. We plan to restrict the Planet to the ‘PlanetMO’ tag soon so that people can use the ‘mathoverflow’-tag without appearing on PlanetMO. But to actually show the advantage of this feature, we are including the other tags for a couple of days.
We hope this feature is helpful, especially for the great community on mathoverflow!
