(Interested in post-Planet scenarios? Keep reading)

Three weeks ago we released a revamped maemo news section. It's still in beta stage, some functionality is missing and there are known bugs, but in its essence it works and provides an idea of what we are pursuing here.

There are some bits that are still not obvious and not explained, though.

We want the maemo community to have a control over the public maemo agenda and memory. Favoriting news items, users currently push these items to the top of the news highlights, and make them stay there more days (increasing their visibility and allowing more people to see the news and favoriting it more, keeping them in the top rank). Note that external factors such as del.icio.us links or Technorati karma also help those items go up, and stay there more time.

One day only the items receiving n favs will jump to the highlights, the rest will run only in the latest block. Items getting too "minus" votes will even disappear from that block (off topic, redundant, offensive... the community decides). You will still be able to get all these items through their source pages.

The highlights will have an own RSS feed for those willing to get only the best news of the day. These news will be the only ones appearing in the maemo.org homepage. The difference of visibility to favorited items vs those not favorited will increase notably.

But there is more, have a look at http://maemo.org/news/best. Now this is only an accumulative experiment, but already works as a proof of concept. The social news system thinks that these are the items *really* relevant since we started with the social news. Just 10 in more than one month, of course according also to the community favs.

The plan with this feature is to release something like a monthly maemo digest targeted to those willing to get an overview about the maemo platform and also for the busy people not able to follow everyday what is going on. Add here your preferred IT manager interested in mobile open source stuff (including Nokia managers), tech journalists, popular bloggers, etc. I even wish to see at some point a Best of maemo 2008 with only the top 24 stories of the year (or something like that).

Your click on a white heart to turn it red will make all this happen. And you will also get more karma yourself, but this is flesh for another post.