Earlier this year I blogged the teaser for an upcoming short film by the team at N1ON, which looked like a really interesting work-in-progress.
Yesterday, their film ‘True Skin’ was released to the world, kicking off a bidding war as studios move to capitalise on its unique visual style in a full-length feature, that will most likely build on the short’s basic premise:
A sci-fi short set in the not too distant future where augmentation is the way of life. For Kaye, still a natural, augmenting will help him keep pace in this now hyper-paced world. However, after acquiring an off-market prototype, Kaye quickly finds himself fighting not only for his own humanity, but something much larger.
I think it shows real consideration for the potential for inner-city living in a post-human age. If anywhere is going to end up like a cyberpunk’s wet dream, it’s probably Bangkok. Take a look:
OK sure, the narrative may be a bit weak, but there are enough unexplored little details to engage the mind, and if it ever does get green-lit I’m sure they’ll have their pick of great writers.
My vote would be for Warren Ellis, who gave The City such depth and texture in his series Transmetropolitan that it – at least to me – stands as the most complete vision of a cyberpunk society to this day.
In this post I’ll introduce you to my new pet project: an experiment in Twitter automation. The Strategy Bot (pictured) is ‘programmed’ to select & retweet key digital media resources, case studies or news items that provoke a higher understanding of the formation of good digital strategy.
He thinks, therefore he tweets.
Some context… I will typically have the odd side project on the go at any one time. Recent examples have included:
Recategorising all my RSS feeds for mobile, web & iPad
Linking up Instapaper / ReaditLater / Pinboard & Twitter
Testing Facebook ads to see if I can drive Twitter followers
Playing with XFBML, the new Follow button and Google +1
Sketching people’s Twitter avatars with my new stylus
All of the above would be worthy of a blog post, and that might happen for a couple of them, but there’s been one project I’ve been thinking about for a while that I reckon just needs to be shared, because, dear reader, I need your help!
I’ve been interested in getting the most out of Twitter for a while, and I’ve been certain there is some utility among the network’s parasites: the lowly twitterbot. I’d love to perform an autopsy on one to see how they really work, as there are some excellent cases of these automata being actually quite useful or cool. For example:
Spotibot – @replies suggested music based on your requests
Wikipediabot – random links to Wikipedia pages every hour
Easy Joke – RT’s with “that’s what she said” on certain phrases
There are loads more listed on the Twitter Fan Wiki, and of course there are millions of spambots that behave in similar ways. But I wanted to make something that would be primarily useful to me, and that others might enjoy too.
The idea arose from the need to detect, share and archive truly excellent links, without cluttering my personal Twitter feed. Did you know you can automatically add Twitter links to Pinboard for archiving? It’s a bloody useful way to passively log the stuff that’s held your attention. And did you know you can create a self-hosted archive of all your tweets? I use Tweetnest to this end, where I’ve been logging my personal tweets here. Try searching for something!
Mr. Strategy Bot is just another way to add useful stuff to my own personal content library. But throughout the course of his life, I’d like him to be useful to everyone. Or at least, everyone that works in digital media (you gotta have a niche). So how should I automate him to this end?
In my attempts to pin down what makes these robots work, I found a number of approaches, typically making use of Twitterfeed (a pretty blunt RSS syndication tool) or the Twitter API (way over my head). I needed something that would let me ‘scrape’ the top links from a list of Twitter users, and automatically RT the top five links.
I have totally failed in my attempts, even after a whole evening spent in the depths of Yahoo! Pipes. For now, I’ve had to settle on the manual way. Yep, I’m manually RT’ing the links until I find a better solution, five a day, with a bit of prose each time to help round out his character.
I will continue to research means of automating his behaviour, as I think the idea of one’s own personal virtual pet social robot is a really powerful idea. Wouldn’t you agree?
[box]Please leave a comment if you can help create virtual life! Let’s give this guy his own A.I. existence out in the digital ether.[/box]
In the meantime, you should follow him on Twitter here.
He’s programmed to follow back!
