socialfiction | psychogeography | PML

PML for a Room

Psychogeographical Markup Language can be used to publish the current atmosphere of your room (or a street) on the internet. A welcome service to your friends who can see if you are at home & if so if are you throwing a party or if you need help to clean after yesterdays festivities. You might also see it as an one entry only blog for your room.

Tags:

Stim & Dross: Terms invented by urban theorist Lars Lerup to describe space in a binary mode. If you are at home your room is a 'stim', if you are gone the room is 'dross'.

Lively & Hectic: The current feel of your room in terms of density.

Open & Closed: These terms usually refer to whether a street attracts you enough to explore it or the reverse of that. In 'PML for a Room' these tags signify if you are willing to accept (unannounced) company.

Tidy & Mess: These terms signify your feeling about the room. Is it tidy or can you use help to clean it up. Some friends might want to stay away if you are throwing a party but the place is a mess. Friends can be like that.

Syndication:

We could develop our own XML scheme for this & maybe one day we will. But why not hijack RSS? Instead of creating the need for yet again a new software-device, people can use their trusted rss-reader to keep track both of their favorite blogs & as well as their favorite rooms.

Plain RSS, whatever specification you use, is pretty straight forward. It starts with a "channel" element that contains the information of the channel, in this case the room: there are 3 required subchannels: "title" (whose room are we talking about), "link" (url to your blog), "description" (whatever you want to tell about your room, or about the channel of the room).

Next there is the element "item", there should at least be always one: if nothing is going on, your room is in a state of 'dross'. This tag can go in the "title" sub-element within the "item" element, it would be handy to add a "pubDate" too. Again a "description" could be used to inform your friends about the specifics of this Psychogeographical Markup or if you want them to bring something. More items than 1 can be added to your PML-feed. Is it elegant? NO! is it eski? YES!

RSS has many more options & you can use them all. Off course the RSS world is a jungle, not every tool might use every tag you use. Here is an example file according to RSS 2.0.

Help

Is there anybody out there that wants to put some time in making a small cgi/php kind of PML-blog utility for swift 'PML for a Room' updates?

LINKS

http://socialfiction.org/psychogeography/PML.html
http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss

 

info at socialfiction dot org