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You know, Jeff Waugh was one of the first Canonical employees before he resigned to work on GNOME-related stuff. He's had issues with anxiety and depression in the past, and he does tend to go off-topic at inopportune times, or not answer email - hardly noteworthy offenses. He wrote Planet, and as far as I know he runs the pgo instance. People who have been around GNOME for a long time are friends with the guy, he supports the project, and you can't expect people to turn on their friends.

Jeff Waugh is an absolute cancer in the GNOME project. He adds nothing to the project but is a constant source of frustration and drama. How he maintains the influence he has is truly beyond me. My only supposition is that because in the past he has done some work in the past and runs P.G.O the other members of gnome's blah blah waah waaahh

A cancer? Really? That's a bit rich coming from... who are you again, Oh Bitter One? What has Jeff done to you, exactly?

I get that attempted character assassination can be fun for semi-anonymous sad clowns, but you're not even landing punches here.

How does it compare to Planet?

MS Patent covers a central system that will be responsible for aggregating various feed formats (RSS, Atom, RDF) and provide a common interface to other programs for using the feed information. Availability of several feed formats and the errors in them makes a nightmare for the applications that need to use feeds. So a common system will be helpful. Several parsers available today to parse RSS and Atom feeds. The most popular one is Universal Feed Parser parses all known web feeds and presents, feed data in usable form that can be used by the application developers. UFP is part of popular open source feed based applications like Planet Feed reader and Democracy Player. So Microsoft's patented process is nothing new. Most of it can be claimed as prior art.

Also Read
Niall Kennedy's wonderful analysis of the MS feed patent.
Blog post by Microsoft Program Manager Lead for RSS Sean Lyndersay defending this patent.

but it seems to not be gaining much attention.

It is fair enough that Ubuntu gets a lot of respect for the distro, I've found it to be of excellent quality. I look forward to seeing how these other tools help development.

Even though I'm not a contributor (other than occasional bug reports and financial contributions) to Free/Open Source Software one of the things that attracts me to it is that I can see the development taking place. I can read Kernel Traffic or various planets and see developers working together to produce something great.

So even thought they might not effect me directly, it's always exciting to read about new tools etc that might help the developers do their thing.

Which two sites are these? Planet Gentoo is powered by http://www.planetplanet.org/

If you like to keep up with your favorite hackers in the FOSS world:
http://www.planetplanet.org/ has a list of blog aggregators for various projects!

For the blogs I am reading, I am using a copy of Planet. While this is not a real RSS reader, it generates a nice slashdot like page from all the blogs I am interested in.