Manifestations of the Creative Web

I've previously mentioned Cisneros. In the terminology of the Wave, he represents "robots" - or as we might say, "pedagogical agents", "learning companions", or even "virtual assistants". This is the most direct incarnation of my experiences with the ITS community. Specifically, his complex encapsulates not only the set of tricks for anthropomorphizing already existing methods of tutoring that we see in most papers on the topic, but the potential for these robots as independent entities - in my mind, through more advanced algorithms for scheduling content based on priors.

The name was originally suggested by Davean after recalling the joke that ITS stands for "Intelligent Torturing Systems". I have, however, come to appreciate the affordances that such labels provide. During my initial return to the greater problem space of the "creative web", I have come to feel the presence of two other manifestations that I have also named so that I may express their particulars more easily. They are not mutually exclusive with Cisneros, or even each other. Instead these three seem to characterize different developments of the creative web that are often present together in a kind of intermingling, yet in a way such that one usually dominates a particular topic and comes characterize it best.

"Mellifera" is how I refer to various social networking issues. These probably gained traction in my mind during the various Facebook scandals that had me shouting, "Divine Retribution!!" - Mainly, I see Facebook as making sensible business decisions, especially considering their currently model, though I have somehow come to associate said model with some form of consumerism. It seems mindless in a way I have yet to articulate (that I can remember during this writing, anyway). The waste, as I see it, is in not engaging privacy and data permissions as a new area of technological development that aides the creative process. In previous discussions, A.R. has mentioned the mechanics on LJ, for instance. It seems that there is a great deal the internet can do for people looking to communicate, by helping them to think about their intended audience. The same is true for data. How can you talk about semantic web ideas without going here? Without claiming to transition, I also toss the notion of "crowd sourcing" in here, along with the notion of barn-raising and wiki communities.

"Theraphosa" represents large data sets and making noms out of them. We have streams of data, even large streams, but we rarely think of these streams as large sets that have interesting properties as a whole. Most of our data is immediately tossed out. I've seen bloggers begin to deal with this in the form of "curation", but this is not automated and can be dealt with through better design of the content life cycle. Google has various labs related to spreadsheets and data sets, although nothing insane. There is even our close relative, PSLC Datashop, although they don't conceptualize themselves in this way. As is probably obvious, I do not currently understand this manifestation as well as Cisneros or Mellifera, but I can clearly sense its presence and, if only intuitively, its importance.