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# The Poietic Generator

The FractalAggregator is an extension of the Poietic Aggregator, which is itself devired from the Poietic Generator. These concepts and experiments have been carried out for several years over the web and the MBone. Unfortunately, explanations and comments are mainly available in french. The goal of this page is to summarize these elements in order to let english speaking people know these independant researchs, criticise them and possibly contribute to further developments.

All the working demos listed bellow are carried out in a logic of functional prototyping. They lead towards a reflection on the orientations of future developements with a concrete testing of functionalities. They are not necessarily to be considered as fixed implementations.

The Poietic Generator

Born in 1986 (Eighty-Six), the PG make it possible a great number of people to act individually in real time on a single collective image. The Multicast version of the PG does it without any central server. The Poietic Generator is the basis of the concept of DigitalPerspective :

The Poietic Aggregator

The Poietic Aggregator makes it possible to visualise RSS feeds on various Internet sites (Wikis, blogs, etc.) for example as coloured grids updated in real time. Colours (or pictures) are associated with various keywords of the RSS feed according to the user's choice.

How to 'read' a RSS grid?

  • The more recent change: top left
  • The oldest change: bottom right.
  • Explore the grid with the mouse.
  • Right click to open a wanted page in a new tab.

The Poietic Aggregator may have two different uses:

  • just for Internet watch
  • above all the exchange of information in real time within the communities of blog users, wikis users or users of all other systems of publications.

Example 1 : http://overcrowded.anoptique.org (Overcrowded wiki):

Example 2 : http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/ ( Barcamp wiki)

Possible application for Wikipedia (visualization of personnal or share watchlists)

The Fractal Aggregator

Working demo for FractalWiki (FR)

Application onto different sub-branches (grid in the sidebar)

Wikinet Aggregator experiment

Licence

Other infos to be summarized

Discussion

It's an interesting idea, certainly. I'm not convinced by the UI, though — it's not clear what useful information is being imparted.

Perhaps the following might be doable? Give each feed its own timeline, with blobs on the timeline representing edits and colours representing editors, and the name of the page edited next to the blob. If the user wants to pick up on various keywords, they could be split out into a new timeline. -- ChrisPurcell

This is the idea, which is more or less achieved, even if it's a prototype and the blobs are uggly. People are free to look and participate to the wiki of their choice. They may also mix 2 or more RSS feeds by using that kind of service http://xfruits.com/ and look at them through one single canva . The issue we are working on is how to let people control their own color and add personnal pictures without any central server, and how to developp it as a free software and as a complement to the WikiNode et and WikiNet initiatives... Ideas welcome.

At the moment, it's more a sort of time grid than a timeline, and there's no way to know how long ago an edit was made. That's what I was referring to. -- ChrisPurcell

There is way to know how long ago an edit was made. It's written into the uggly blob (to be redesigned!). For now, a time grid seems to be suffisant to test the concept, but it will probably evolve to a timeline in the future. It has to be written in AJAX. We are looking for contributors, time money, etc. ;-)--OlivierAuber

Thanks for copying the text Sunir. I hope MeatBall people will enjoy testing it here, or on other wikis, see CommunityWiki:WikiNetAggregator .--OlivierAuber

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