David Akin

Videogames are art

I remain convinced that computer and console videogames will be seen as a serious art as soon as some journalist somewhere does what Pauline Kael did for film: Get the world to take the art form seriously.

There are lots of serious videogame artists/animateurs but the genre is still waiting for its Pauline Kael.

On that note, here's a neat, if longish, reflection by a vidgame journo.

RSS?

A lot of folks I would refer to as Net-savvy still look at me with blank stares when I talk about blogs or Weblogs. Even more think I'm an unredeemable geek when I start talking about news readers and RSS feeds. Well, there's a terrific column from a terrific columnist this week. Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury news lays this stuff out for a general interest audience in his latest piece.

For the ``publisher'' -- a word I use in the
broadest sense here -- RSS is a way to present structured information. For users, it's a tool for getting the content we want, when we want it.

He continues:

I wish public-relations people would get with the program, too. If they'd only start creating RSS feeds of releases, journalists and the public at large could see the material they want, and the PR industry would be able to stop blasting huge amounts of e-mail to people whose inboxes are already over-cluttered. Of course, there will continue to be a use for e-mail in PR, but the volume could be cut
substantially.

I'm hopeful that Michael O'Connor Clarke who blogs by night and by day runs the Toronto tech practice at the public relations firm Weber Shandwick Worldwide can convince some of his A-list clients like AOL Canada to add this as one way they communicate. Perhaps others will follow. As for those already doing it, so far, I've come across just one organization whose PR folks have an RSS feed. It's Concordia University (Click here for XML feed of Concorida's press releases) in Montreal. Bravo, Concordia, for being a pioneer.

Now, if only someone could settle the argument over what RSS actually stands for . . .(I vote for "Really Simple Syndication") . . .