Feeds, Mushrooms and Shamanic Urine

For some time now, I’ve eventually been discussing with an ingenious friend the innovative use of feeds as a “microcontent foodchain”-tool, bridging the gap between aggregation, “continuous partial attention” management, re-publication and circulation.

Just yesterday I found related posts by Scott Wilson, whose FeedForward project indeed is sounding extra-cool, by Brian Lamb, and – commenting on Brian’s entry – the pioneering Stephen Downes. I really wish these forces could be loosely joined in some way …

Interesting why it seems to be difficult to fund this, as Brian remarks. This sounds much bigger and more important than 90% of 2.0 apps still shooting up like mushrooms. (But this mushroom soup might be still worth a look.)

Another soup-loving friend coined the “Shamanic Urine” metaphor for the Feed Project we are thinking about. We really should use this as codename for the project … Here is why:

MYCEL: The amanita muscaria mushrooms grow only under certain types of trees, mostly firs and evergreens. The mushroom caps are the fruit of the larger mycelium beneath the soil which exists in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the tree.

EX NIHILO: Ancient peoples were amazed at how these magical mushrooms sprang from the earth without any visible seed. They considered this "virgin birth" to have been the result of the morning dew, which was seen as the semen of the deity.

URINE: The active ingredients of the amanita mushrooms are not metabolized by the body, and so they remain active in the urine. In fact, it is safer to drink the urine of one who has consumed the mushrooms than to eat the mushrooms directly, as many of the toxic compounds are processed and eliminated on the first pass through the body.

RSS/ATOM: It was common practice among ancient people to recycle the potent effects of the mushroom by drinking each other's urine. The amanita's ingredients can remain potent even after six passes through the human body.

BEYOND THE METAPHOR: The really interesting thing is how to enrich the RSS-stuff through using it, so that feeding it back and sharing it makes it even more powerful … any ideas?

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