Archetypal Garage…take two

The new “next” thing is springing up like the dandelions in our back yard: self hosted social media clients.  Today Matt Mulleweg shared the news bout P2, a new WordPress theme that turns a blog into a twitter like (or more accurately a friendfeed like) environment.  The user interface is surprisingly smooth for a first generation release.   What takes place in the AG is viewable by the public and can be subscribed to by rss.

So what’s it all mean?  Small groups can now break out of or away from the massive platforms that are getting all the attention these days.  It’s no different then hosting a conference or a party or a retreat at you own place.  No different then opening up your own cafe on the main street of a small town.

Take One

A few weeks back I opened a room over at friendfeed called the Archetypal Garage.  The goals were twofold: to see if providing content regularly to such a space would be useful and to see if others would be interested.  The experiment was thumbs up on both accounts.  Sharing content with a bookmarklet into the room was as easy as cake and a few folks seem to have become regular participants.

Take two

So tonight I’m taking the plunge and opening up my own social media cafe.  The Archetypal Garage (AG) is now self hosted at http://archetypalgarage.com .

Folks that would like to become contributors will need to email me at ccseed at gmail dot com and request the keys to the garage.  An author account will be set up providing a username and password.  All authors will be able to interact, add content and comment from the home page when logged in (to get a feel for how this works, see the video in Matt’s post).  Everybody else can comment on the stream like on a regular blog by clicking on the small number to the right of the post date and filling out typical blog comment id info.

And what can you expect at the Archetypal Garage?

The Archetypal Garage is a place to foster discussion threads around imaginal experiences.  Themes include the archetypes, myth, the unconscious, dreams, visions, art and whatever else seems appropriate as the participants build this group content stream.