Mashup Online Magazine That Writes Itself

That’s an art project I’d love to see one of these days: An online magazine that writes itself, based on a calendar, a pre-written set of tags connected to the calendar, and a bunch of RSS feeds.

Imagine, just for simplicity’s sake, a lifestyle magazine for women. (Of course, every other type of magazine would work just as well, given that so many magazines tend to repeat themselves after pretty much predictable patterns.) Say we’ll make a quarterly for starters, so it’s just four issues per year. (Later, we could scale up to monthly.) We could have the mag suck in RSS feeds for certain tags in certain months like this:

March: Summer fashion, easter, red, workout, sports, bikini, diet June: Fall fashion, sports, earth colors, diet September: Winter fashion, fireplace, dark colors, diet December: Spring fashion, christmas, Santa, presents, return presents, holidays, skiing, diet

Of course, this list should be a bit more refined, and maybe just a tad less cliché. (Then again, if it was less cliché, then what would be the point?) So we could take text feeds from Technorati, images straight from Flickr, maybe even add a few YouTube videos. Frankly, I’m fairly certain that the result would be a magazine that wouldn’t be all that different from a whole lot of the magazines you’ll find in your trusted store’s magazine shelf.

Any mashers out there with the skills and too much time on their hands? I’d love to see that thing.

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