RSS feeds as art; the bastard child of Eyebeam’s ReBlog and Cameron Marlowe’s Blogdex with a bricolage old newspaper graphic feel.
… this introduction is inspired by the earliest comment on the first version of r-echos (which at that time used to reside on anti-chambre, laboratory 01, in a folder called /feedonfeeds) and it pretty well resumed the idea behind. Now with the future versions of this online reader’s digest
we are heading towards a semantic informationnal hub.

There are a couple of location where to look at for more information about this ongoing project. One of the main page where i try to maintain a certain regular flow is on anti-chambre.blogspot.com assembling it was mainly intended to monitor the progress of the first laboratory on anti-chambre.net which has recently exploded in kyriels of projects/websites considered sufficiently self-sustainable.

r-echos in its actual form is the third version of the experiment; all began in March 2004 after a disussion with christophe guignard form fabric.ch. He then sent me the link to one of the software we spoke about, and i simply started to hack around. It was in the middle of my master, and has been one of the main side project for the examination. The purpose was to investigate in the newly appaering phenomenon of feeds and syndications. It then kept a very specific place in my activities - i started to consider it as a reader’s digest, and then like a very personnal magazine.

On a technical point of view it started with the software developed by Steve Manutillo, called FeedOnFeeds. The database was enough simply designed for me to start hacking into it almost immediately, the clearness of the code (clearer than expected ) helped a lot as well. A simple additional checkbox allowed me during months to copy selected articles in a second database - used on the other side (the front end) to re-publish those articles. At exactly the same time the term reblog made its own apparition, and other experiments were popping all around - especially i have to mention Reblog from Eyebeam NY which was already on the niche before. We were using the same software (feedonfeeds) and i kept an eye on what they were publishing (a kind of retroactive loop) with my own solution. They even republished an article about my experiments, which of course stayed on the top of my republished articles’ list for a few days - producing a second stage into the retroactive loop. The article was describing r-echos as an evil bastard in between reblog and blogdex - i quite liked the term and started to be more and more radical in the choice of the republished articles, mixing influences and sources.

At a certain point i started to be a bit frustrated with my archival solution - i only had access to the data trough a search query. That was the time of the emergence of the tagging meme. I started again to hack in the database structure and inside manutillo’s wonderful FeedOnFeeds. Quickly done, i was rapidly expanding my tags database with each article.

Until the rupture point.

I had something like 850 different tags and needed some additional tools to take care of my newly born tag farm: INFO_HUB was born. INFO_HUB is still nowadays an ongoing experiment in the fields of semantic uses of databases, taxonomy and tagging systems, and online publishing. Now r-echos is (proudly) powered by a Word Press engine, slightly customized to feet my needs; i also installed a couple of softwares and plugins as others did better than i could do with the reduced spared time i had at the moment (starting my own studio, working for clients, …)

At some point as well, the number of feeds inside the feedonfeeds software made it impossible to update the rss feeds - too much data - it was taking hours to refresh the whole db. I was dreaming about a perfect solution which would organise the article depending on some criteria - like most of the desktop software do. At that time, i was starting my own studio and activity as independent designer, and consequently had way less time than during my MA in écal. I needed an efficient solution to stay on track on many different points, it was mainly about a kind of information overflow.

- keeping archive online and offline
- updating the feeds without too much hassle
- filtering the informations throuh keywords
- a performant system to archive and browse republished articles on line
- an evolutive system which would allow me to build step by step the whole system i imagined

So far sounds pretty like a personnally crafted 2.0 solution. Having designed quite a few projects from scratch i was already quite conscious of my own limits.
Seeking for a better alternative i tried quite a lot of cms/blog engine.

I loved the way wordpress got ready in the minute, plus all its plugin functionnalities.
In the meantime Eyebeam produced a rework on the feedonfeeds with the reblog software.
Despite, I decided to switch to a desktop software solution as i came across Net News Wire, bundled with Mars Edit. With NNW i had the possibility to create filters (smartlist as they call it) like i do with iTunes. I’m now in the quest for an auto generative solution which combining my tags’ bookmarks on del.icio.us would, trough applescript, produce automatically the filters.
Also i’m completely found of the google mashups - and mapping articles would be quite a nice features (geoloc.info_hub).

What is amazing so far, is that the system can always be developped, streched, combined, altered, connected… I’m still wandering where it will lead me.

[more to come soon, still aggregating and glueing stuff]