Creative Synthesis Blog

Talking about Creativity as Combination, The thoughts and works of the Creative Synthesis Collaborative.

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We’re happy to announce that we won’t be updating the personal zeitgeist anymore. Pez, an open-source project that is being developed by Lee Kelleher and Ben Taylor was developed with the inspiration of the personal zeitgeist. We’ll be switching to Pez once everything is up and running, and we encourage everyone else to do so too.


Personal Zeitgeist was a very simple homepage for the person who leaves parts of themselves scattered all over the web. It was essentially a personal rss aggregator, with some basic structured information. It was divided into a few parts:

  • Profile: Some basic information about you, a picture, and possibly some contact information.
  • What you’re saying: Aggregates of blogs you run, journals, notes, etc. Basically anything you own that has a feed.
  • What you’re seeing: For now, your flickr account feed from your public photos.
  • What they’re saying: A feedster search of your name, with any pages that reference you or work you’ve done.
  • What you’re reading: Feeds from your bookmarks, like delicious, or even information from your google reader starred page.

Installation was easy, just drop it in any php enabled web server (see the readme for more detailed instructions). Initial loads might be slow, but repeated queries are cached to improve performance.

The personal zeitgeist is built on top of the wonderful SimplePie and licensed under the LGPL. Special thanks to our colleague Leonardo Bonanni for offering his identity as the default sample for the project.

You can still download it here (unsupported) or see a demo here.

This thing was constructed by .
Matthew is the Director of the Collaborative. He writes rarely, and that makes him sad.

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This thing has 5 Trackbacks

  1. Posted April 25, 2007 at 3:45 pm | Permalink

    [...] individual. We might be doing a little more with this later. It’s a free download for now. Available here. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web [...]

  2. Posted June 5, 2007 at 3:00 am | Permalink

    [...] made a great app a month ago, and i should really have blogged about it since my life is the sample page - but you [...]

  3. Posted August 28, 2007 at 12:12 am | Permalink

    [...] getting ready to launch several new recycled research projects at the Recycling Center. The Personal Zeitgeist has been in use for collaborative members, and as a stand alone install. We plan to test a hosted [...]

  4. Posted January 21, 2008 at 8:14 pm | Permalink

    [...] started to look at a PHP script called Personal Zeitgeist to pull everything together.  It looks decent enough, so I’ll see how I get on with it. [...]

  5. Posted February 13, 2008 at 8:25 pm | Permalink

    [...] Personal Zeitgeist is very easy to get up and running, although I have been making a lot of tweaks - mostly to satisfy my own coding preferences; for example: renaming the *.inc files to *.inc.php - so that nobody else can view the source-code. (That’s been one of my long-term gripes with, the otherwise brilliant, SimplePie). [...]

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