The Shouting Gypsy

This project is the end result of several thought process that were happening in my already overcrowded brain. Firstly I was trying to figure why I don’t use my blog as much as I used to, certainly time was a factor but not the answer, as was novelty of the new platform wearing off and become a chore. But mostly I think it’s the permanence of a blog post – the pressure to write something good, up to the standard of the rest, that represents me as a brand.

Much about the same time I was also thinking about Podcasting and its little deformed brother Vodcasting and wondering what would Wordcasting look like? And what would be its difference to a blog post? Just a silly thought but it was scratching at my head. The two things that struck me with podcasting was how convenient and disposable they are, if your using ITunes your podcasts just slip into your library unannounced and after they’ve been played they can be binned..

And finally I was thinking about how I use the net. Yes I do have the whole Internet at my fingertips most minutes of most days, but I would be a liar if I said that I strayed far from my e-mail account, my twitter page and my feed reader. OK I do check out links suggested by others but more often than not if I do like the website I will just chuck the feed into my reader and never go there again.

So what if I can produce short bursts of writing that have no permanent history or space that are squirted directly into the e-mail accounts and feed readers of people that want them. Short semi-coherent mobile rants from wherever I am fired directly to those that are interested to be read or ignored as and when. And with the filter of the web site removed maybe the writing would be more informal and relaxed, more personable.

I’m not claiming to have invented the next Google here, it’s basically a feed with a locked home and a mailing list grafted onto it with the finesse of a drunken MASH unit surgeon. Group mailing lists have been around since as long as there has been an Internet. And I am indebted to things like Christopher Locke’s Entropy Gradient Reversal and Warren Ellis’s Bad signal mailing list for being part of this things DNA.

The idea appealed because I knew it was do-able using existing services and the system isn’t perfect, more cobbled together using duct-tape and spit. It also appeals to the iconoclast in me; this is strictly web .05 stuff and bucks the idea of slick design and flashy flash. There is no built in feedback system other than people unsubscribing of course they can contact me through twitter and post things to there own website – so it’s still part of the grand conversation. Ideally the feeds would disappear out of your readers after a couple of days or so, the feeds and e-mails would be real-time and there wouldn’t be the locked Posterous account; but my web-fu isn’t up to those meager requests and the whole thing is likely to mutate anyway.

So here it is the Shouting Gypsy Wordcast. Ephemeral cocaine text bumps delivered right to your face.

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