For better or for worse, changes keep coming. Below are some of the
bigger ones that happened this past month:

1. New front page
The new front page allows our superusers to cast a broader net,
collating interesting things both from Rhizome Raw and from the broader
world of new media arts online. The backend involved all sorts of
components stuck together inelegantly with chicken wire and duct tape,
but I won't bother you with the details (other than to thank the teams
behind the reBlog and Wordpress projects for putting out said
newly-sticky software). The end result is far more interesting: A front
page that pulls content from all corners of the web. And if you've got
a new-media-arts-related RSS feed out there, please email it to me, so
I can pass it on to all our superusers.

http://rhizome.org/

2. Location
From time to time at Rhizome, I get emails that read like this: "Dear
omniscient webmaster, I just moved to [city that is not New York or
London], and would like to find out about the new media arts scene in
the area. Whaddya got for me?" Thus was born our new Location feature,
in which Members can opt-in to display their location. We hope this
will help people build and strengthen new scenes in places outside the
stereotypical art hubs. It's also just sort of cool; right now you can
see that there are at least two Rhizome Members living in Finland.
Shout-out to my peeps in Finland.

Keep an eye out for more cool Location-y features in the future. In the
meantime, browse it all at:

http://rhizome.org/location.rhiz

3. Featured Member-curated exhibit

Once a month, we're spotlighting a member-curated exhibit. When such an
exhibit is featured, that means it can be viewed by everyone (not just
Members), and the artworks it points to can be viewed by everyone else.

http://rhizome.org/art/member-curated/

4. Featured Artwork

We're also featuring an artwork once a month; this art will be out of
the Rhizome Archives and viewable to everybody. As of now, this work is
"Nio", by Jim Andrews.

http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2441

5. Member RSS

Every single Member can have an RSS feed, which will track their texts,
artworks, and member-curated exhibits. This was rolled out last month,
and it's pretty cool to see an extra 300 feeds added to our list of RSS
feeds ... However, I have to admit this first phase of the features
isn't quite done, since I think there's something a little off about
the updating of this feeds ... With any luck, I'll get the gremlins out
of this feature this week or the next.

That's it for now. Please be generous with the feedback--do these
features makes sense? Are they easy to use? Are they useful to you at
all? etc., etc.

best,
Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org
phone: 212-219-1288x202
AIM: francisrhizome
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