mediator (thing)

A term for any cgi script on a web page which reads in another web page and gives it back to you altered. Publicly available examples include:

• Babelfish - probably the most famous mediator
• the Shoudoka Browser - probably the first
• the Malkovich Mediator
• The Dialectizer
• Burn Time
• The Anonymizer (no writeup yet)
• One dialectizer take-off (can't remember the adress) that made everything sound as if Mr. T was saying it (and changed some pictures to A-team framegrabs, and another (www.askjesus.com) that inserted random Jesus-related words and images
• and perhaps most famous of all, a mediator that would take any web page and make it backwards-- as in, it would reverse not only order of letters, but arrangement of tables and even reverse the images themselves.

Mediators will generally take the page to be mediated as their CGI env "argument", and then adjust all links within the mediated page to filtered through the mediator; however this is not a definite rule, and Babelfish, for example, stops you at an intermediary page with banner ads every time you click a link into babelfish.

The core behind Shoudoka, the Malkovich Mediator, and crit.org is open-source and publicly available at crit.org. You can easily create your own arbitrary mediator with very little effort by using the code publicly available there as a base.

A more complete list is at http://www.lfw.org/ping/mediator.html
The first five examples above have been written up. The rest have not. Msg me if you write any of these up and i will add a link.