I agree with a lot of what you said, and really miss DWN myself. For people already interested in, and involved with Debian, reading mailing lists, the wiki, and the blogs on planet was probably a better way to keep up. However, DWN was important as it was an easy to find, and easy to read summary. Keeping up with hundreds of mails, updates on the wiki, and skimming blogs to filter out the Debian related stuff[0] is hard work.
DWN was also important as it was being translated to different languages
and the fact that it was made a de facto timeline of everything
happening in the Debian universe.
I honestly believe PR and generating hype is two of Debian's major
shortcomings. For example, www.debian.org doesn't contain any
interesting news about the Etch freeze, no snapshots of the eyecandy the
debian-desktop project has made for etch, etc. The design itself looks
like something stuck way back in 1998. The newly created debian sites
for debconf[1] by comparison looks modern and fresh.
0. I don't think the planet only should be limited to Debian
related postings, but for someone only interested in the
project, and not the people in it, I guess it's a problem.
1. http://www.debconf.org/ and http://debconf6.debconf.org/
--
Cheers,
Sven Arvidsson
http://www.whiz.se
PGP Key ID 760BDD22
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