Visualising your book
Booki provides an RSS feed for everybook. This means you can follow a book and see the edits made etc. Each RSS feed is linked from the info page. For example the book about OpenMRS has an info page here http://www.booki.cc/openmrs/_info/ and the RSS is linked from the bottom as so : http://www.booki.cc/feeds/rss/book/openmrs
A few weeks ago we asked for some help creating a visualisation using this source. Pierre Commenge responded and started developing a Processing visualisation of the RSS feed. Processing is a free software used a lot for creating visualisations (http://fr.flossmanuals.net/Processing/Introduction).
Pierre has a prototype available that runs in a java applet (http://emoc.org/fmviz/0.5/) below is a screen shot of the visualisation of the CiviCRM book produced in a FLOSS Manuals Book Sprint.
Visualisation of a book being made
So this look pretty cool. The live version enables you to play a timeline and see the development of the book over the period of 1 day.
This not only looks cool but it enables you to see how a book is being made. This is extremely interesting – imagine if we had all the data about how every book has been made up until now…it would tell us a lot of things about book production process and the differences between different models etc…its a very exciting idea and we hope to be able to explode this idea in the following weeks and months in our experiments. Many thanks to Pierre for getting this underway.