serial consign

[régine debatty's recent interview with w. james au in prss release #02]

Between the multitude of feeds that course through the blogosphere and variety of social bookmarking platforms there is currently no shortage of methods to curate information on the web. That said, online writing and reblogging can be a tad exclusive at times (i.e. writing and software tools "by bloggers for bloggers"). I just caught wind of an interesting project with a distinct take on the idea of aggregation that is worth mentioning. prss release is a new venture that is aptly described as an "independent paper blog aggregator". The project is a weekly PDF publication that curates ten posts from a variety of design related blogs into a compendium print-ready text. The prss release mission statement reads as follows:

Information is confined to domains. Although different mediums merge more and more, still the concept of ‘cross-media’ is an ideal which is rarely realized, and if attempted often unsuccessful. One of these confined domains is the blogosphere, a mystery to the most of us and even to most internet users. That is where prss release comes in. We want to disclose all the goodies that are posted in the blogosphere to an audience that doesn’t keep track of blogs on a daily basis, an audience that hates reading more than a few sentences from their computer screens.

Exact statistics are hazy but it has been suggested that as few as 5% of blog readers subscribe to the RSS feeds of their favourite online writing projects. That considered a publication like prss release provides an invaluable service by compiling a "hotlist" of choice posts from across the blogosphere into a composite text for people that might not read said content otherwise. It is quite a brilliant idea - why start a new publication when you can just consolidate a "magazine" out of a variety of writing distributed under a Creative Commons license? My opinion might be a bit biased as I was quite flattered to see my Free Running in the Digital City post featured alongside recent content from top shelf architecture and design blogs like Subtopia and Digital Urban in prss release #2.

prss release is the brainchild of Marten Dashorst and Edwin Gardner, both architecture grad students in the Explore-lab studio at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Their project is only three weeks old and it will be interesting to see if the venture resonates with the wider architecture and design community. If you are interested you can subscribe to the prss release email list to receive announcements when future PDFs are released.