[artinfo] Turbulence Spotlight: "liken" by criticalartware

[Jo-Anne Green]

Turbulence Spotlight: "liken" by criticalartware
http://turbulence.org/spotlight/criticalartware/index.html

"liken" stores criticalartware's growing database as a collection of
self-connecting nodes that anyone can contribute to. Users need to log
in to enable "liken" to make sense of their movements through the site.
Unlike anonymous "browsing," "liken" facilitates a more personalized
form of navigation: the very act of navigating results in a generative
process that creates new linkages, alters old ones, and contributes
resources to the community. Thus, "liken" resembles a biological neural
net that is based on human activity: it is a collective, distributed
system of emerging patterns, pathways, and connections.

"liken" departs from the typical hierarchical web site structure by
relinquishing some of the control of "hard-coding" links between
documents. "liken" is also described in a public XML file, making it
possible for anyone to develop alternatives to "liken's" structure:
"liken" could easily be traversed as a 3D video game, a mindmap, a
soundEngine, or a Flash animation. In this way, it is the beta version
of a criticalartware operating system, for which anyone can develop
compatible applications, plug-ins, skins, or filters. "liken" is an
agent of criticalartware's resources that grows symbiotically with
related discourse.