The universe (which others call The Twitter) is composed of
every word in the English language;
Shakespeare's folios, line-by-line-by-line; the
Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, exploded;
Constantine XI, in 140 character chunks;
Sun Tzu's Art of War, in its entirety; the chapter headings
of JG Ballard, in abundance; and definitive
discographies of Every. Artist. Ever...
All this,
I repeat, is true, but one hundred forty characters of inalterable
wwwtext cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be.
[more inside]
posted by 0bvious
on Oct 27, 2012 -
14 comments
Keepon , the bot that bounces to the rhythm!
"[It] is a small creature-like robot with a soft rubber skin, two cameras in its eyes, and a microphone in its nose. Keepon is designed to interact with children by communicating attention and emotion. It has four degrees of freedom: attention is directed by turning +/-180° and nodding +/-40°, while emotion is expressed by rocking side-to-side +/-25° and bobbing up to 15mm:"
posted by Phire
on Aug 22, 2007 -
24 comments
Sternest Meanings: A fancy schmancy bot that takes what you say and returns a darn good anagram. "Shaky catacombs enchant fatty. Anyway thunderous star. Roman and ga-ga road." My conversations with
bots always end up with me cussing and/or crying.
posted by bjork24
on May 28, 2006 -
15 comments
"To tell the truth ... I'm sorta surprised they haven't caught me yet," The Washington Post ran an interesting interview with a botmaster, a young man who made serveral thousands of dollars a month installing XXX spyware on machines that he controlled. He installed the software on the machines of people he did not know by hacking into them remotely. The lenghty article included a partial photo of the botmaster along with vauge descriptions of the small midwestern town where the man lives, and was published with the understanding that the man's identity would be kept secret.
Someone should have told that to the person that manages photos at the Washington Post. An estute reader over at
Slashdot was able to locate some extra information stored in the picture's metadata including the photographer and the location the picture was taken, Roland, Oklahoma, a town of less than 3000 people. Whoops.
posted by daHIFI
on Feb 21, 2006 -
56 comments
GuitarBot
"In designing GuitarBot, our goal was to create an electrified slide guitar that was versatile, responsive, capable of fast and slow playing, easy to control, with high-quality sound, modular and portable. We also wanted to extend, not simply duplicate, the capabilities of a human guitarist."
Don't miss the
video [16 meg Quicktime]. Brought to you by the
League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.
posted by quonsar
on Dec 1, 2004 -
34 comments
Iraqfilter. "Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them." The robots.txt file is here. And here's the
Slashdot discussion. I guess it's hard to restore integrity to the Presidency when people can compare your statements over time.
posted by condour75
on Oct 27, 2003 -
29 comments
Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer are fighting, again. It started over a remark
Dave made about various blogging services.
Mark turned around and created a
bot that reads Dave's RSS feed every 5 minutes and spits out the text, annotated to show what's been added/deleted/changed since the last time it ran. Dave's claiming copyright infringement, Mark's claiming fair use. Okay MeFi folks, which side are you on, and why?
posted by tommasz
on Jul 11, 2003 -
60 comments
Is Grub out of control? Barely more than a week old, the distributed search engine is already causing headaches. It does not properly follow the
Robot Exclusion Standard and thus spiders sites against their owners' wishes. Because it is a distributed client run by thousands of volunteers (and therefore connects from many different IP addresses), it is non-trivial to block. The Wikipedia project, for example, is
experiencing slowdowns because of it. Let's hope they can solve these problems, as the idea seems to be quite cool.
posted by Eloquence
on Apr 23, 2003 -
7 comments
SBC Customer Service staffed by bots? The bots themselves don't bother me too much, I think its pretty cool if SBC Yahoo has bots advanced enough that they can use them for online customer service and the bots turn out to be actually helpful (I don't know, since I never have problems with my DSL and have never used them). What is disturbing, though, is the apparent deceit involved by having that the bots insist on being human. Anyone know anything more?
posted by akmonday
on Feb 19, 2003 -
17 comments
BotFighters: BotFighters is a brand new type of action game. The mission of the game is to track down and battle with other players, but in BotFighters, the real world is the game arena. You have to move yourself physically close enough to be able to hit.
The game concept is similar to "Gotcha!", or virtual paintball. Your mobile phone is used as a weapon and a radar device to track down opponents. When playing, you can at all times be attacked by other players, so be careful! You play with your mobile phone by sending SMS commands to number 6688. (from
play)
posted by andrew cooke
on Oct 19, 2001 -
8 comments
From the googlebot FAQ: "For most sites, Googlebot should not access your site more than once every few seconds on average"
I thought it was a mistake at first, but they go on to say that you should contact them if "we are placing too high a load on your site"
Do they really hit some sites that hard? If so, is it really necessary?
posted by Nothing
on Jun 5, 2001 -
17 comments
InfoBots are coming. I believe we've touched on this before, but now it seems to be moving from concept to reality: Instant Messenger "buddies" that are actually bots. You send them an IM with a question, such as "Hey pal, what's the weather in
Thunder Bay, Ontario?" And it IMs you back with the answer, almost instantaneously. No waiting for messy web sites to load, no funky searches to run.
ActiveBuddy has been the most, um, active in developing the technology, but they've been working on it forever without anything to show to the public. Now, it's out there, somewhere. CNET is reporting today that an ActiveBuddy beta bot has been live for a few months; you can play with it right now if you know its name. (And if you do know its name, a tip would be appreciated. I've been jonesing for this for a good while.) A more public version is supposed to be out in a few weeks. Here buddy buddy buddy...
posted by aaron
on Apr 25, 2001 -
17 comments
