Interview Bot Benediction, 2015
Our now-traditional #botweek closing peers inside our metaphors and the fragile magic of the bots we make, use, and love.
Roundup Attack of the Helpful Chatbots
A roundup of the little bots that make daily research and administrative tasks easier and more fun.
Project The Strange Tale of FCCliefs
- By Dylan Yep
It started as a joke and turned into hashing through thousands of Net Neutrality comments the hard way, then building a chatbot to post them and interact with curious readers.
How-to Die, Bot, Die!
When and how to say goodbye to the bots when something has gone terribly wrong…or when no one’s really laughing anymore.
How-to Hi, Weatherbot!
A Node-based Twitter bot, one easy step at a time—plus the way John Keefe teaches basic botmaking to class of journalism/design students.
Tool Mockingjay: A Smarter Repeater
Meet our Twitter bot that follows a list of users and retweets them when they mention a certain topic.
Tool Thank You, Electionbot
Offloading some of a burden of continuous human monitoring to a friendly bot can be just the comfort you need on a cold Election Night.
How-to A Botmaking Primer
Not sure where to begin with this whole bot thing? Joseph Kokenge is here to help you get started with botmaking 101.
Roundup Quakebots and Pageview Quotas: Bot or Be Botted?
- By Matt Waite
Matt Waite on Daft Punk, algorithmic news, hamster wheels, and journalism’s Rushkoff moment.
Project A Bot to Find the Source of Serendipity
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.
Project An Open Source Bot Factory
- By Albert Sun
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.
Project How We Made @NailbiterBot
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.
Project How to Break News While You Sleep
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.
Roundup Welcome to Bot Week
- By Erin Kissane
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.
Project Creating an API of Veterans Affairs’ data
- By Cole Goins, Erika Owens, Shane Shifflett
- Cole Goins, Shane Shifflett
- The Center for Investigative Reporting
The Center for Investigative Reporting recently released an API of data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which it compiled in reporting on a backlog of disability claims.
Project Meet Tarbell
Introducing a very simple content management system from the Tribapps team (and friends).
