Yesterday, Rhizome changed the way their front-page is built. The site now uses “a heavily-modified version of Eyebeam’s ReBlog software” to publish content to the front page of the site. It’s unclear whether or not the published content goes into their Rhizome RARE email list.

Director of Technology, Francis Hwang, wrote this about the change:

The goal is for the front page to become a quick, easy filter for the entire field of new media arts online—both for our current Rhizome users and Members, and for anybody else who might be interested in the field but not know where to start looking.

Site readers won’t see much of a change, except that the thumbnails that accompanied each post are no longer present.

My reaction is mixed. It’s nice that Rhizome is extending itself into the networks of RSS and blogs out there. But now that it’s gone, I sort of miss Rhizome’s own quirky way of publishing. Rhizome had it’s own way of doing things by getting all it’s content from user-submitted email. With the change, it just seems like another blog — which isn’t necessarily bad. Blog-like publishing is becoming more and more standardized and the change will enable Rhizome to aggregate important content faster, but it partially loses it’s individuality in the process. permanent link to this post