Angry Robot

Feed Me

(see this post for the first part)

So I changed shit around. The feed importing / splicing wasn’t really working well. It’s a new feature on tumblr, so no love lost. More to the point, though, it led me down a different train of thought, about the manifold feeds one generates if one has even a mildly active online life. It is something I have been thinking about for a while, as someone with various websites (not to mention accounts on other websites) and just as many interests, not all of which would necessarily appeal to everyone. So with the modern state of RSS feeds, each granularized interest can create its own feed. For example, since flickr, delicious and presumably any blog can spit out a feed just for a specific tag, you could configure something like tumblr to take only photos tagged ‘grafitti’ and links tagged ‘singularity’. Or you simply tag items you want to show up on blog ‘x’ with ‘x’.

Then that got me thinking again about generalism vs. specificity, something I will write more about in the context of newsfeeds, blogs and the overall death of generalism in the world of microniche adwords… OK fast forward. Avoid half-baked thoughts.

Splicing two specific-topic feeds together creates something interesting. Depending on how it’s done, it becomes like cross-cutting, or more interestingly, Eisensteinian montage, a dialectic collision of opposing forces.

Plus, Smooth Music is too good a title to waste on an ego-feed.

So, it will be – for a week or as long as its scatterbrained editor maintains interest in it, whichever is shorter – devoted to old school rap vs. eastern philosophy.