[arg_discuss] is this ARG?

[Jeff Watson]

Hello everyone,

First, a brief introduction: I'm Jeff Watson, a PhD researcher in the Media
Arts and Practice program at the University of Sourthern California School
of Cinematic Arts. You can read about that here: http://imap.usc.edu/ -- or
on my personal site here: http://remotedevice.net. Basically, I'm lucky
enough to be earning a doctorate thinking about and creating ARGs and other
kinds of distributed cross-platform storytelling and gameplay activities.

I'm posting here to ask the SIG for a little input on a social
media/curatorial project I've been working on that, among other things,
aggregates RSS feeds from the blogs and Twitter accounts of some members of
this list. Ideally I'd like to develop it a bit more before going live, but
for a project like this, there's really no way to test it offline. So here
goes:

     View the project here: http://isthisarg.org/

In short, the site is a social media aggregator that gathers feeds from the
ARG community/affinity. Kind of like a Twitter list, but drawing in feeds
from blogs, Delicious accounts, and other open/publicly-available social
media sources as well -- 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 on the
sidebar list is gathered and put into a single stream on the root page, but
you can also 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 and generating keyword clouds to help with browsing through past
days' 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 kind of an effort in that
direction, and also a bit of a curatorial endeavor: for me, this project is
kind of like curating a magazine or journal of sorts, populated not by
articles or essays but rather by people and *voices*.

Anyway, curious to hear everyone's comments. Since this is still super-beta,
any suggestions for more names/sources for isthisarg.org would be much
appreciated. And thanks for being a continual source of inspiration to me
over the years.

Happy holidays!

Jeff

--

Jeff Watson
http://remotedevice.net/