Articles tagged: bots

1. 

   Quakebots and Pageview Quotas: Bot or Be Botted?

   By Matt Waite

   Posted on March 27, 2014

   Matt Waite on Daft Punk, algorithmic news, hamster wheels, and journalism’s Rushkoff moment.

2. 

   A Bot to Find the Source of Serendipity

   By Jacqui Maher

   Posted on March 26, 2014

   Just before Thanksgiving last year, a new novelty Twitter account gained notice in our newsroom. @NYTMinusContext, promising “All Tweets Verbatim From New York Times Content. Not Affiliated with New York Times.” tweeted fragments from Times articles that you might not think twice about while reading in article format. Isolated, though, these phrases can be absurd, surprising, and delightful.

3. 

   An Open Source Bot Factory

   By Albert Sun

   Posted on March 26, 2014

   Albert Sun from Interactive News team at the New York Times tells how they use Huginn, a Ruby on Rails project, to create automated agents and scheduled tasks.

4. 

   How We Made @NailbiterBot

   By Noah Veltman

   Posted on March 25, 2014

   The first full round of March Madness is Christmas morning for college basketball fans: 2 days, 32 games, lots of upsets and late-game drama. Last week, on the first full day of the tournament, WNYC transportation reporter Jim O’Grady casually mentioned that he couldn’t keep tabs on all the action during the day. He wished he could get a text message whenever a game was coming down to the wire so he would know when to neglect his professional responsibilities and tune in for the end. I started kicking around the idea in my head a little, and after work my colleague Jenny Ye and I decided to take a break from writing weird JavaScript to write some more weird JavaScript. The result was @NailbiterBot, a humble Twitter bot that posts a tweet whenever an NCAA tournament game is close late in the second half.

5. 

   How to Break News While You Sleep

   By Ken Schwencke

   Posted on March 24, 2014

   Around 6:25 a.m. I was awakened by a jolt from slipping tectonic plates. The tremor didn’t last very long, and as soon as my window stopped rattling my first thought was to check for an email.

6. Welcome to Bot Week

   By Erin Kissane

   Posted on March 24, 2014

   Automated news-gathering tools aren’t new, but they’re multiplying like crazy and getting quite a bit of attention. Little bots have also turned into interesting remixing devices and distribution channels, especially on Twitter. This week on Source, we’re going 100% bot.