jeff watson

Anyone using an RSS reader to access the content on this site may have noticed a sudden flood of micro-posts (about 20 of them) on Thursday, February 11th. The reason this happened is because I have started to use a great plugin called FeedWordpress to aggregate all my tweets from Twitter. This makes it possible for me (and you) to search for links and ideas I might have posted via Twitter using this site’s search function. I’ll be integrating a few more feeds this way over the next week, so don’t be alarmed if another flood occurs: this is just FeedWordpress gathering the most recent 15 or so instances from whatever feed I’m pointing it at.

If you don’t want to receive my full social media flow, you can subscribe to my blog feed only here.

is this ARG? is a social media aggregator I’ve built to gather feeds from the ARG community/affinity. The site is kind of like an amped-up Twitter list, displaying feeds from blogs, Delicious accounts, and other open/publicly-available social media sources — including the Unfiction forums and even Wikipedia.

The idea is to amplify the potential vectors for collaboration and research among and across the ARG community (and provide a handy real-time research tool). Everything that gets posted across the web by the sources listed on the site’s sidebar is gathered and put into a single stream on the root page. I’ve also made it possible to view the individual output of people/sources on the list by clicking on their names. There’s an FAQ on the site, and I’m also working on some more features that will roll out soon, including a way of archiving everything, curating venn-diagram-like clusters of streams, and generating keyword clouds to help with browsing through past posts.

The inspiration for this came in part from something Brooke Thompson wrote in reference to the ARGdb project, something to the effect of wanting to find a way to bring together all the energies members of the community are putting into different web fora. This is an effort in that direction, and also a bit of a curatorial endeavor: for me, making this project is kind of like editing a magazine or journal of sorts, populated not by articles or essays but rather by voices.

In an effort to bring together our disparate postings from various corners of the Web, I created the IMAPgregator, a content-aggregation system that collates everything iMAP students, researchers and faculty submit to blogs, social networking sites and social media sites anywhere and everywhere. The IMAPgregator, located on the IMAP home page, displays all this material in real-time by tapping into the XML/RSS feeds created by the sites and services that students and faculty use to share thoughts, links and media. These feeds are then rendered as a chronological list of entries.

Why do this?

We decided that we wanted visitors to our site to be able to see what we were up to at a glance, rather than forcing them to hop around various external sites to get a sense of who we are. We also thought it would be a good way for everyone associated with the program itself to cross-pollinate sources of inspiration and knowledge. It’s how we’re grappling with the issue of distributed online identities — by “de-distributing” all the bits and pieces of our online existences and presenting them here in a linear flow.

Additional Information

The IMAPgregator is powered by the Wordpress plugin, Lifestream. Sorting functionality and dynamic display of feeds is enabled in part by the Custom Field Template plugin.

I’ve decided to shake things up a bit around here to better reflect my online practices: the site’s main page will now display a lifestream aggregating feeds from the various web communities I participate in; the blog will focus more on original posts, leaving the reblogging-type posts to Google Reader, Delicious and Twitter; my portfolio will collect creative works that I post to this site; and the newly-minted notes category will gather together everything from research archives to notes-to-self like this.

Remotedevice Aggregation Schema/Site Structure

Feeds

• Delicious – “resources and tools”
• Google Reader – blog posts read and recommended
• Twitter – time-sensitive stuff, primarily work-related
• YouTube – vids
• Flickr – pics
• Wikipedia – edits
• blog@remotedevice.net – original blog posts, curios, core research notes, trailheads to documentation
• portfolio@remotedevice.net – creative works, primarily
• USC IMD – stuff relevant to the IMD

Not visible

• documentation@remotedevice.net – papers, presentations, notes and notions