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The Rise of Twitter Bots : The New Yorker
“What drives affection for Tofu is less narcissism than reliable ersatz companionship in Twitter’s crowded, cliquey lunchroom; Tofu Product is everyone’s imaginary friend.”
“One of my first bots was Exosaurs, which combined Wikipedia’s list of dinosaur species and the Kepler telescope’s list of confirmed exoplanets—both freely available datasets—into an hourly feed of extrasolar mega-reptiles. The bot also credits each Exosaur “discovery” to one of its followers—“ryanpeeler, Gyposaurus of HD 290327 b”—creating a low-grade sweepstakes of speculative biology. When Exosaurs failed to recognize the programmer Ramsey Nasser after a few days, he created the bot “Fuck Exosaurs” to spew profanities at Exosaurs until it awarded him Santanaraptor of PSR B1257+12 c. Soon afterward, the novelist and coder Robin Sloan created Exoriders, which assigns each new Exosaur an intrepid galactic travel-mate, deepening the lore of an accidental universe. Exosaurs now has a community site, a leaderboard, and Exoslash—a bot I made to respond to Robin’s bot with auto-generated Exorider erotica. Richard Dunlop-Waters later made Law & Order: EXO to demonstrate that this kind of one-upmanship can only lead to brutal space murder.”
h/t Jon Becker
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Old but interesting examples of types and examples of Twitterbots. Considering building a response bot.
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“You can shape serious stories to make them shareable and more informative for the public. We’re not talking about watering down serious journalism — we’re talking about crafting stories for the digital audience.”
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‘Big Me, Little Me’ self-portraits « Flickr Blog
A Flickr blog post focused on a photographer whose images I used way back in 2007 to illustrate the “Bob on Blogs” presentation. His comment below is one of those statements on the value of publishing in the open that ought to be saved (so I’m saving it).
“I couldn’t have imagined anything like this both at the time and where it is now,” Paul says. “It’s a little ridiculous, but it’s awesome, I love it.”
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P cubed presentations: Edward Tufte makes me feel guilty.
So pretty much the opposite of 95% of keynotes.
“Tufte maintains that, “Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity.” It is clear however that these responsibilities belongs not only to the presenter but to the audience as well. When we stand to report our science or our business, we owe our audience honesty and diligence in the delivery of those facts. As much integrity is also required in the conclusions drawn; the audience do not have access to the primary data and thus if we imply, show evidence, trends toward or conclude this must be reasonable and honest. In receiving such presentation we cannot simply reply, “thank you for your presentation, I enjoyed it very much,” and stand idly by when supposition is portrayed as fact, when guesswork is illuminated as conclusion and where misrepresentation by error or comission becomes fact for future use. ”
The opposite of 95% of the keynotes you’ll see #tufte http://t.co/DAGCpSOtTw
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) November 15, 2013
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The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom – Ian Bogost – The Atlantic
Not too different from what we’ve done with/to edu (h/t Audrey Waters).
“McDonald’s accurately lists the patty’s primary ingredient as “boneless pork,” although even that’s a fairly strong euphemism.”
We know that we do not know the composition of the McNugget or McRib or McWhatever, but we do not know precisely what it is that we do not know. Nevertheless, we desire such products not in spite of the fact that we do not know it, but because we don’t. This apparent paradox rests at the very heart of McDonald’s cookery: the secret components and methods that make it possible to create cheap and predictable, sweet and fat fast food. We normally don’t talk about it, but the chemical composition, mass-manufacture, and freezer-to-tray reconstitution of fast food isn’t just a convenient means to produce a result people enjoy. Instead, that very manufactured falseness is itself what we desire, in food as much as in smartphones—what is high-tech if not designed fakery?
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Nothing new under the sun . . . a whole Tumblr devoted to history through Instagram (h/t Will Berry).
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Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 9781400067824: Amazon.com: Books