Now – if this level of information management (by the bot) is possible – what else may we try for? If we were to say that the bot is the ‘smiling face’ of The Polyopticon Project – then it would make sense for the bot to be ‘aware’ of basic details relating to Polyopticon projects past, present and future. Perhaps when a project is ‘set up’ with Polyopticon – basic details are recorded in the bots database so that the bot can respond intelligently about what is going on the world of Polyopticon. One could pose it questions like:

‘What is going on this week?’
‘What is the next project that is coming up?’
‘What do you know about this project?’
‘Where is the page for this project?’
‘What is hot right now?’

In addition to the passive information management – whereby basic project details are submitted to the bots database, another exciting angle would be if the bot had the facility to actively aquire information from Polyopticon web pages – like a webcrawler or something. That way, it can keep itself up to date.

Alex Scott
www.growingbrain.com.au