The contradiction inherent in building a site – MetroCascade – that aggregates news and blogs, and then not updating one’s own blog, hasn’t escaped me. So, without further ado, some …updates!

First, after a month of featuring Benjamin Madison‘s photographs on MetroCascade‘s “see” cascade, we’re delighted to present another Victoria-based photographer, John Simpson, also known as The One-Eyed Man. Go check out his photos, in particular (of course!) his Victoria category.

In other news: we think that MetroCascade has to become actively involved in curating some of the amazing writing and information we’re aggregating on our site. Curation, as I see it, is Editing 2.0: all of you who are blogging or posting news are autonomous content creators, and under Editing 1.0 someone might have come along to “edit” your content for style or brand or whatever. No more: you’re the brand, you’re the publisher, you’re the author. Write away. And wowsers, people write. We’ve aggregated around 200 sources, and we’re still adding more. The range is incredible, from people who are writing about their personal lives, about Victoria, or about death and dying, government policy, marketing, business, beauty, design, living on houseboats, identifying garden plants… The list goes on: check out the Authors page on our site, or take a look at Categories.

Hmmm, or maybe don’t take a look at Categories, because that’s another area still very much under construction. When we started MetroCascade, we didn’t envision quite such a plethora of content, and frankly, it’s not going to scale if we try to assign ‘categories’ to people who write across a broad range of topics. My own blog, for example, is categorized under urbanism, but I write about a lot more than that.

So… as I said: the whole Categories thing is under construction (idea-wise). How are we moving this forward?

Well, at MetroCascade, we’re trying to figure out how to add value to what you’re doing. One way (we hope) is by providing the platform (our site), so that readers and users interested in what people in Victoria are up to can come here (to our site) and immerse themselves in the cascade of information that’s flowing through here, and from which they can click through to your site.  But an additional way is by curating – putting together a digest of sorts, thematic groupings that belong together, or pointing to and highlighting noteworthy posts or news.

That’s the next step, and I’ll be trying it out on this blog first.

A word to the folks who’ve given us the advice that our blog needs to be part of our site: we understand, and in the coming weeks we’ll install the needed software on our servers to run the blog there – at which point it will have a new url beginning with metrocascade.com. Right now, there are just too many other technical things that the programmers are working on. Once we’ve migrated the blog over to our servers, the curated digest might then stay on the blog, or be incorporated into the main site. It’s still tbd.

Posted by Yule