When Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams curator Kate Armstrong first approached me about creating a new work of electronic literature based on the texts of TCR 2-50 the only criteria was that the work explore formal and functional properties of RSS. Was that something I was interested in? I hadn’t really thought about it before, but after a moment’s reflection I realized it’s be almost impossible, in this Web 2.0 world, to NOT use RSS in some way. And that I find very interesting indeed!
Some of you know all this already - feel free to skip ahead. Others of you have a glazed look in your eyes. What the heck is RSS? What’s the big deal? In her essay Feeds and Streams: RSS Poetics, Kate Armstrong explains: “RSS is an emergent standardized format that makes it possible for information of any kind to be sent as an ongoing feed, creating a world where cultural information is customized and spontaneous.” What does that mean? You don’t have to visit your favourite web sites any more; subscribe to their RSS feeds and they will come to you! “Here is how you know RSS: you will have seen the tiny orange button on the blogs you read. You will have been offered the option to subscribe to any given stream, subject, tag, or person at any of the myriad points in the fabric of Web 2.0 living.”
To subscribe to the RSS feed of Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams, click on that ubiquitous orange button in your web browser’s location tool bar now. All subsequent posts will feed into your RSS feed-read of choice. Don’t worry - when you click on the button further instructions will follow.
If you’re reading this right now, you could be anywhere. You could be reading this post on the Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams website. Or maybe you’ve already subscribed to this feed. Maybe someone has imported this post into their blog and you’re reading it there. Maybe you’re reading it on facebook: my friend Babble Brook has created a Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams facebook group and she is importing the Tributaries feeds into her notes. You can too. You can comment on this post using the form below, you can share this post on facebook, you can post this page to del.icio.us and then tag it up, or you could pass on the URL the old fashioned way - via email.
The significance of RSS as a new standardized format derives from its capacity to use a programming language called XML to harness the ability to freely and dynamically distribute any type of information: not only text, but music, not only music, but video – in fact any granular, machine-readable feed from anyone using these systems. RSS is behind podcasting, blogs, and social networking. Consistent with one of its acronyms, RSS is simple, real simple. RSS means you can upload a dynamic playlist to your iPod every morning before you commute. RSS means you can track anything in the blogosphere that uses the word “rocketship.” RSS means that anything you write, I can see. RSS means … simple, syndication, stream. Kate Armstrong / Feeds and Streams: RSS Poetics
Tributaries is a two-way stream. It sends posts out into the RSS stream, but it also pings multiple external RSS files trolling for changes and every time it finds new data it pulls chunks of XML in. Let’s say you’re on the Tributaries website right now: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca. See that vertical strip of square images to the right of this text? Every time I add a photo to my flickr account, it gets added automatically to this site. See that list of “Word Works” to the left? Those are my del.icio.us bookmarks. Every time I bookmark a web page the link is added here.
This issue of TCR marks a foray into how to bring digital literature into a new space, how to make it a thing in the world, functioning in a way that other cultural artifacts have taken to functioning. This is a way for literature to be found again in everyday life. It is an argument for using this technology for artmaking, and for bringing art, bringing writing, text, literature, into new spaces.Kate Armstrong / Feeds and Streams: RSS Poetics
Still not sure what we’re talking about? This video will explain everything: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, by Michael Wesch, posted to youTube in February 2007.
other islands in this text-fed stream
Comments
This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 11:59 am and is filed under Babble Brook, EXCERPTS, J. R. Carpenter, Kate Armstrong, PARTICULATE, VIDEOS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
“Indeed, it seems to me that one writes into a field of writing that is as invariably and promisingly larger and less masterable than the one over which one maintains a provisional authority, and that the unanticipated reappropriations of a given work in areas for which it was never consciously intended are some of the most useful.”
- Judith Butler