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.

Given the rapidly evolving nature of digital identity management and recent data portability movement, it is hard to ignore the imminent shifts in our understanding of online presence. Lifestreaming and interoperability are paradigms that have the potential to consolidate our online activity and connections across a multitude of platforms. Given these emerging developments, there have been several noteworthy developments in online "conversation management" over the last several months that are worth examining.

The first application/platform to consider reconfigures the way we think about online reading. fav.or.it (pictured above) is a web based RSS reader that has been beta-testing for the last several months. What makes fav.or.it distinct from traditional news readers is the fact that the application integrates feed comments with content, so readers' responses to a post would show up as an addendum to the original post in your reader. fav.or.it describes this process as "full cycle reading" and I really appreciate the democratic thinking behind this project as it accurately reflects the conversational nature of the blogosphere. I have to admit there are some blogs that I only subscribe to and follow because of the value the readership bring to the posts through commenting and this tool would be ideal for tracking these sites.

I was chatting with Howard Rheingold about fav.or.it over twitter a few weeks ago, and he pointed out the exponential increase in incoming content we'd all be subjected to if we used this service. While this is true, I think content/comment aggregation might inspire readers to become more dedicated and more involved with fewer information sources rather than scanning hundreds of feeds and commenting selectively.

If you are interested in learning more about fav.or.it a good place to start is the Read Write Web review from last summer. The fav.or.it development blog also has some great video interviews with Nick Halstead, the creator of the project.

Another recent project that explores the networking of texts is ThoughtMesh, a project launched by Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich in Vectors last fall. ThoughtMesh is a system for publishing and navigating scholarly texts. The system allows authors to apply tags to specific portions of a text and these tags are shared across the entire inventory of content residing within the system. This allows for lateral navigation through related texts and proposes an alternative to the generic footnote/endnote/reference "markup" with which texts have traditionally been annotated.

An excerpt on the inspiration for the project culled from Ippolito's author's statement:

It's no secret that today's academics are having trouble keeping up with networked media. The currency of academia remains the peer-reviewed print journal--not exactly the ideal medium for intellectual discourse in the fast-paced age of the Internet. The archaic criteria by which most universities award promotion and tenure mean that even academics who specialize in digital culture find it hard to justify writing about it in a digital vernacular. But if scholars don't want to drift ever further out of touch with the information Twittering and Flickring across the world's browsers and cell phones, they'd better find a way to tap into and redirect these information flows.

I have yet to take this system for a test drive with my own writing - I hope to plug a text into it soon. One drawback I can see with ThoughtMesh is the fact that it is closed, i.e. the content has to be placed within the system and it requires some effort to do so. I could picture a bookmarking-like interface being more efficient, but probably at the cost of diluting the purity of the taxonomies driving the system. This critique aside, I've been wandering around the database of content archived thus far and ThoughtMesh is quite an efficient navigation tool for slicing through these texts.

If you are interested in learning more about ThoughtMesh you can take a peek at the splash screen for the project, the demo video or this response to the project posted on Grand Text Auto from last October.

[expressive processing & commentpress]

In addition to providing commentary on ThoughtMesh, Grand Text Auto is the host of the final project to be examined. A month ago, media theorist Noah Wardrip-Fruin announced that he would be peer reviewing his forthcoming book Expressive Processing on Grand Text Auto. This is the first time an academic has (outright) conducted a blog-based peer review and it is a real testament to the knowledge and expertise of the community surrounding Grand Text Auto. I'm extremely excited by this gesture as perhaps it represents the beginnings of a shift within academic culture towards a more meaningful engagement with the less formal protocols of blogs and online publications.

Wardrip-Fruin is using the Institute for the Future of the Book's CommentPress system to facilitate this peer review process. CommentPress is a WordPress plug-in that allows comments to be displayed inline, alongside body text. The application was previously deployed in McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory project.

Despite my interest in the context in which the preliminary version of Expressive Processing is being presented I haven't had much time to spend with the text itself - I'm hoping to review it here on Serial Consign sometime in the coming months.

I recommend keeping an eye on all of these projects as I feel that they are collectively emblematic of sweeping changes taking place right within the management of online discourse.