PKB

The Los Angeles Fire Department has a blog post up explaining the benefits of RSS to their readers. Here’s an excerpt:

With RSS, you don’t have to reveal your email address to have the new content, such as LAFD News, delivered to your computer. If you want to stop receiving information, you don’t have to request to be “taken off the list”. One click, and poof… the subscription is gone.

Plus, since there’s no email address involved, there’s no way some publisher can sell, rent or give away the means to contact you. That’s right… no more spam, viruses, phishing, or identity theft. And best of all, no reason to put yourself at the mercy of an unknown publisher’s intentions.

…

Again, if you don’t like the content, you can make it disappear as fast as you can change a TV channel. With just one click.

Two things popped out for me in the above:

1) The use of more familiar technology to help explain RSS — in this case, email subscriptions and channel surfing the TV.

2) Referencing the negative experiences people might have had with unsubscribing or privacy to distinguish RSS as a positive alternative.

I think there’s a lesson here for us as we think about helping more people get the full benefits of the Web. RSS is a fundamental technology that is changing and broadening the way everyone can find and stay up to date with information that matters to them. Yet awareness of RSS is minimal.

The LAFD is on the right track by taking the time to explain in approachable terms what RSS is like, and how it makes the Web experience better. I’m still looking for a really good, thorough example of this kind of explanation — though this tutorial by Daniel Bricklin is in the ballpark.

For no good reason, I was thinking a lot today about zines. Back in the nineties, there was an upswelling of zine culture in the US that peaked mid-decade.

In my twenties, I published a zine called Fungus with my friend Justin. We were just out of school, living in Oakland/Berkeley, and we had a bunch of friends who made art: writers, musicians, photographers, painters.

The inspiration for our name was the discovery of the world’s largest living organism, a sub rosa mushroom that extended across state boundaries and whose individual outcroppings did not hint at the connections hidden beneath view. Our tagline was “Tabloid Lit for Working Class Spores.”

We published a grand total of two issues.

It was sweet.

Creating our first issue introduced me to industrial strength software. I wouldn’t have learned how to use Photoshop or QuarkXPress, if I hadn’t had a higher purpose I was striving towards: publishing the damned thing and getting it into our friends’ hands.

I still remember staying at the day job office till midnight printing hideously expensive (and ultimately unnecessary) color proofs. Meeting the animators at Colossal Pictures and pitching them on contributing unpublished comics for our second issue. The absolute joy the day Factsheet Five listed us in their index and mistook our Xeroxed work for offset printed. And loving the art people we knew had made.

I’m pretty sure I have the digital masters for Fungus #1 and #2 buried away somewhere. It’s not really important to me if I ever relocate them. What matters to me is that at a time when my friends and I wanted it, we had the means at hand to create something meaningful to us and to get it out into the world.

I believe that art is one of the highest order bits people bring to life. It’s transformative, for both the artist and the audience. It’s fundamentally participatory. It explicates the soul of the individual expressing it.

So in many ways it’s a beautiful thing to see the explosion of expression on the Web, ca. 2006. Seeing people use the technology we all have at hand now to share of themselves, to connect with other people. To make art.

No more Xeroxing hand stapled zines, and handing them out at shows and parties.

It’s better this way. Right?