Americanium is a public-facing site aimed at arts, heritage and tourism audiences. An editorially focused, social media content aggregation web site, Americanium delivers content from a selection of top U.S. art institutions, galleries, cultural heritage sites, as well as inspired individual bloggers and a variety of artists.
The project is an effort to make possible the pulling together of content via RSS in simple sustainable and readable ways. Despite the marvels of social media, those same tools tend to fragment access and the presentation of great theme-related editorial content being generated. Americanium shapes users experiences in ways that make them feel like they’ve traveled the cultural landscape of the U.S. in one fell swoop.
This innovative aggregator pulls together and mixes multiple news (RSS) feeds from differing and popular social media sources such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc., and presents them in a news website wrapper. Americanium presents automatically generated content links on hosted publisher sites. The public-facing shell sits upon a Drupal framework and CMS, and uses ThinkRSS, a newly developed RSS mixer module.
Americanium demonstrates how existing and new social media content can be amalgamated as RSS links in a low-cost, easy-to-consume way. It could allow culture agencies, academic organizations, businesses, publishers or public sector organizations to attract and engage with all sorts of audiences without investing in large content development teams. Once you’ve set up some feed URLs from the back end, it practically runs itself.