What follows is a fairly brief description of the fungi project, keeping it short so that I don't have to describe it yet again to someone over AIM.
Imagine a really easy way to post up any type of information you want to the internet. You could post up a photo album, or an mp3, or a video, or you could post up a journal for the day of what happened in your life. Fungi aims to create a really easy interface to do any of that, and make it extensible.
Each form of something you'd want to store in Fungi, like a journal or a photo album is called a "type". You then create a spore and it is "one" of that type. So your photo album of you at beach week is "one" of the type photo album. You can also create your own types. You can rearrange the information however you want.
Each type is made up of elements. An element could be a comment describing the photograph, or a title with a simple 5 word explanation. It could be also be a file, such as a photo or mp3.
For example you want to put an essay you wrote up on the internet for public consumption. First you find there isn't any "type" for essay. Humbug you say, so you go and make your own spore. You include a title, since all good essays have a title, and you include a "comment" which will hold the body of your essay.
Then you create an essay with the type of "essay". Then you can fill in the values, so you fill in the title and call it 'green bananas'. You fill in the comment with your essay about green bananas.
Bob comes along and says "hey that's a cool essay". So bob clicks the "+" at the bottom of your spore, and it gets a higher rating. You also get a higher rating, and so does everyone else who is higher than your essay on the heirarchy. So if your essay is the child of a spore called "my dreams", and "my dreams" is the child of "journal" both "journal" and "my dreams" get a higher rating.
This causes those spores to rise up up up to the top of the spore pool. Which in turn causes more cool people to see them, and gets you more ratings. The opposite also happens if mary doesn't like your essay so she lowers the rating.
But mary can only lower your rating by a little bit, because her rating is low. Mary hasn't created much content, so she has little power of other people's spores. The more content you create (and the higher rated) means the more power you have to influence the rating of other people's spores.
Moving on...
That's a basic rundown of how Fungi works. The really cool part will be when I get everything kicking so you can add in spores of your own desire. Then Bob can link his photo album of The Special K's concert to your mp3 recording of the concert. Daniel can upload his video of the concert and link that to your recording, and when someone visits his spore it'll even show a little link to Bob's photos.
So stay tuned....