J2D3

Scuzzlebot

I’ve been thinking about my domain, scuzzlebot.com, and what I want it to be. Scuzzlebot is an idea I’ve had for a long while but just haven’t yet put together. It’s basically an automatic reblogger mashed up with a markov model based conversation simulator. It will automatically generate image and video-based blog entries with “quirky” editorial text.

Scuzzlebot will scan the RSS feeds I select for video and images that are accompanied by editorial commentary. It will collect in a mysql database the urls of stories, their titles, and description text blocks, and the accompanying video(s) or image(s) along with their respective titles and captions… Then, using a set of conditions that I set, Scuzzlebot would periodically (or stochastically!) select one of the images or videos and generate some accompanying editorial text. This text would hopefully be relevant to the images or videos that are chosen, but it would also hopefully not make too much sense. I want it to be “quirky” rather than boring, after all, Scuzzlebot is “merely” a dumb robotic “citizen journalist.”

Scuzzlebot is coming, and - I think he’s pretty pissed off about some things, he’s got strong opinions about politics for sure. He’s strangely concerned with what certain young female celebrities are doing at any given time of day or night, and he is obsessed with who is gay and who is not. He is not shy, he does read all the comments on articles he finds intriguing, and he also posts comments wherever he can get away with it. (It’s sometimes hard for robots to post their thoughts on message boards, but Scuzzlebot will never abuse the priveledge.)

I came up with the name “scuzzlebot” from scuttlebutt, as in - a gossip (some bloggers qualify) and scuzzlebutt, the South Park character, and the “bot” instead of “butt” has the obvious meaning. Of course, I google everything I “think of”, because nearly everything I “think of” has already been thought of and further has already been posted online somewhere and indexed by google, and I found this incredible image:

on this incredible page:

http://members.tripod.com/~Triad3587/Scuzzlebot1.htm