Much talk lately of the changing nature of architecture blogging (sort of) and a recent reference reminded me of prss release, and inventive aggregator of sources in a PDF format… sort of quasi blog + magazine in one… Some words below from the editors:

:: image via prss release

“We are proud to announce prss release, your weekly independent paper blog aggregator. In this editorial statement we’ll explain about the what, why and how of prss release…

“…Information is confined to domains. Although different mediums merge more and more, still the concept of ‘cross-media’ is an ideal which is rarely realized, and if attempted often unsuccessful. One of these confined domains is the blogosphere, a mystery to the most of us and even to most internet users. That is where prss release comes in. We want to disclose all the goodies that are posted in the blogosphere to an audience that doesn’t keep track of blogs on a daily basis, an audience that hates reading more than a few sentences from their computer screens. We do this independently, not for profit, for fun, for all our friends who are not the nerds that we are and to bring the writing efforts of bloggers to a larger audience…

“The format of prss release is simple. Weekly we collect the ten posts of the past week that we think are cool, interesting, thought provoking, funny or which are worth publishing for any other reason we come up with (or not). We put these posts in a clean readable lay-out with the appropriate credits to those of who’s content we publish. We publish it as a PDF file, which is available for download for a few weeks, we keep an archive of all issues in the form of a hyper-linked tables of content to the original posts we used in each issue of prss release.”

As far as inventive forms of communication, this makes a lot of sense to me. Partially it is a personal taste – as a lover of books – I always love to read on paper and am not predisposed to reading on the screen. Honestly, I can’t stand it… perhaps too many hours of staring at a screen doing CAD or writing in Word… This probably makes me somewhat of an oxymoron, touting sustainability and printing reading materials… but I just can’t see a day where books are irrelevant… seen in the interest in taking blogs and making them into books.

Also, I still love the newspaper delivered every day (and it gets double duty in sheet mulching as well) – specifically the Sunday NY Times… nothing electronic will ever replace that. Plus as prss implies in their poster… it’s difficult to take your laptop into the bathroom, and where else do you get that sweet feeling of multi-tasking… 🙂

Also, it’s interesting, as I’ve been tracking posts via my own PDF archive of Landscape+Urbanism for the past few months – because as convenient as searching and scrolling is – after 150 or so posts it’s great to have a written record to scan through – placed by my desk at work. Mostly divided into some of the main ideas (ecoplanning, vegetated architecture, and urban agriculture), it’s a quick reference guide to augment the blog. Wanting to know what that cool project in Vegitecture #18 was… look it up, with a paper and digital record. Plus I’ve got a books worth of material already… Really, I fear someday I will accidentally do something to delete all of the content, and this gives a bit of redundancy.

So kudos to all of those out there taking a look at revising the media and the message to fit our changing tastes. Definitely check out prss release… it may be similar to the Harvard Design Reader, where you’ve seen some of the posts/articles previously, but compiled in an easy to carry format… re-read it again, someplace… well, um… convenient.