a universe of self-updating weblogs
All of these blogs are, apparently, algorithmically generated. Click on "updates".
Monday, July 25, 2005
About Me
-
- Name: Jay Thomas
- Location: San Francisco, CA,
email: badwithtitles at gmail dot com
Previous Posts
- Hypnopompia
- a quote from Oppen, a break/an ending . . .
- Abductors threaten to kill journalist Jill Carroll...
- look into my eye
- Pimp
- conciousness/subjectivity as being becoming non-be...
- is there anybody out/in there?
- Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
- pangrammaticon's birthday (+1)
- swift report: god denies links to pat robertson
poetry published online
- litvert
- muse apprentice guild - summer 2003 / fall 2003
- wickedness.net
weblogs
poets
poetry/art mags/collections
political
other blogs
other non-blogs
misc stuff
listed on
Blogarama
4 Comments:
Interesting development. Had to happen, I guess. Pretty rudimentary stuff, and I doubt these algorithms will get the sort of readership that will make them effective advertising vehicles, though you never know. If you have time, I'd love to hear more about how they work. We may have some interesting versions of the Turing Test coming. In any case, posts like,
"Busy...
Jet-laggy. I know, I haven't blogged lately , but I had a busy week.
I'm sorry, but I hope you can understand that other work does take priority"
(lay-d off rage)
and
"No time
Insanely busy. Feeling worn out."
(thingy)
seem just to be dishonest, but perhaps no more dishonest than some healthy "mom" telling you what a helluva time she has getting those grass stains out of some "jimmy"'s little league uniform. Some old lie.
Same old lie, I meant.
Agreed -- those throw-aways are kind of cheap. But then, people *do* post stuff like that . . .
The "AI" behind it is apparently a Unix-based program called the Dada Engine. It's fed info from new product lists on Amazon, movie reviews, and so on.
One thing which impressed me -- and maybe it shouldn't have, I'll have to give it more thought -- is that text and links actually correspond pretty well.
A problem with this is that the blogs all seem to have the same "voice" -- it would be far more interesting if the programmer had somehow managed to build-in some meta-variations in terms of the way things are stated.
BTW, here's the official explanation from the site:
how are the weblogs generated?
Only the properties of each weblog account are stored. No weblog entries are stored on this webserver, so in theory a huge number of weblogs could be hosted. When a certain page is requested, an account specific function is used to determine the time each blog entry is posted. This time is used as a random seed to select a topic and to generate the text with the Dada Engine.
Several webpages on Amazon, Blogdex, Google, Fark, Gracenote and IMDb are periodically visited by a bot that harvests recent gadgets, memes, news, music and movies.
mod_rewrite is used to simulate the URLs of different blog tools.
Templates are generated by a script that uses the template id as a random seed.
example
E.g. consider this entry:
August 2, 2003 - 11:35
'La Hija del canibal'
Last night I went to the movies and saw 'La Hija del canibal'. I had a good time. Carlos Álvarez-Novoa's performance is terribly poor. But the cinematography and the script are pleasant.
A function determines that the 7th entry in this blog is posted on August 2, 11:35. This time is used as a seed for the random generator.
From the available topics for this blog the category 'movie' is randomly chosen and a movie that was released the week before August 2 is selected from the database, in this case 'La Hija del canibal'. This database is filled by a bot that monitors the IMDb periodically.
The information about the movie, like title, director (Antonio Serrano) and main actors (Cecilia Roth, Carlos Álvarez-Novoa, Kuno Becker) is then passed to the Dada Engine movie script which looks like this.
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