Keeping Up with Machinima
Apr
Various people may be interested to know how we keep up with the latest in Machinima. There are, basically, three tools that Johnnie and I use:
Of course we visit Machinima Premiere daily - indeed, pretty much hourly - as by far the best Machinima news and information source out there right now. Hint - if you’re on MPrem, check both the “latest comments” and “latest forum posts” on the right hand side. DXvid - is there an RSS feed for them?
We tend to surf Machinima.com and Sims 99 periodically for films, but mostly I tend to check out films when they’re getting some buzz either in the blogosphere as a whole, or on MPrem. So that doesn’t really count as a whole tool! BTW - I’d definitely recommend Sims99’s forums if you’re into Sims 2.
Machinifeed is just brilliant - it’s an aggregation of a whole bunch of Machinima-related blogs (including this one, Paul Marino’s blog, Z-Studios, 3D Filmmaker, all that good stuff) into a single website and RSS feed. You can subscribe in your RSS reader, if that’s how you roll (I use Bloglines, I’m not sure what Johnnie’s using this nanosecond but he keeps talking about writing his own) or you can just read the page.
Finally, I’ve got a Technorati watchlist with the word “Machinima” on it. ‘rati watchlists are fantastically useful little devices, which literally alert you whenever a specific word is used in basically the entire blogosphere, ever. There’s a certain skill to surfing them - basically, every post gets one glance, and if it doesn’t look too relevant, then gets summarily ignored - but if you can do that, they’re fantastic for picking up gems others might miss.
Hmm - one thing strikes me here. I wonder if we need a Machinifeed for the various Machinima forums? Rooster Teeth’s Machinima forum, MPrem, Sims99, M.Com now they’ve fixed their spam problem. It’d be quite high-traffic, but it’d be useful.
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I’ve been thinking about that too (discussion feed), and possibly an aggregate new films feed too, since most of the movie hosts have separate feeds for those.
I’d definitely welcome an RSS feed for the discussion forums at MPrem, and MCom too. I’d be concerned about the high traffic if we included all the prominent machinima forums, but I suppose I could always write a filter. I’m just being lazy.
One thing that Hugh didn’t mention is that Google News allows RSS subscriptions to its search results. For instance, here’s a link to an RSS feed for Google News results containing the word “machinima”:
RSS Atom
These feeds, although auto-generated, will update themselves on each feed pull. Your aggregator should be able to track the results, and mark them as seen or unseen in the same way as any other feed.
My own quest to find the perfect feedreader is legendary, and still on-going. At the moment, I’m recommending BlogBridge, which is free, open-source and cross-platform (through Java). As well as running as a thin-client on your chosen machine, the software has a rather ingenious method of syncing with an external database (on the BlogBridge servers), which means that you can effectively share an OPML list dynamically across multiple PCs in different locations. For someone like me, who never chooses a simple solution if a complicated one is also available, this is a godsend.
Here are the mprem feeds
I can also easily add all the Machinima Movies/Producers categories but as that would be about 25 extra feeds I’m not sure it’s worth it, would there be a demand for them?
Btw my reader of choice is “Omea”. I did try half a dozen of the more popular ones but like Omea the best, maybe because I’m used to it now, but it does everything I want.
[EDITED: corrected feed url - JOHNNIE]