Oct 1, 2012
Subsection of 5 days of common interests across all Weavrs at weavrs.com
seen from China
seen from Macao SAR China
seen from United States
seen from Austria
seen from United States
seen from Philippines
seen from United States
seen from Vietnam
seen from South Africa
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from Indonesia
seen from United States
seen from Pakistan
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Netherlands
seen from El Salvador
seen from United States
seen from United States
Subsection of 5 days of common interests across all Weavrs at weavrs.com
Weavr showing 3 partitions, in 3D.
The Tumblr Turing Test
I feel like I am being secretly targeted by developers working on software smart enough to pass the Turing Test.
For those that don't know:
Bot: a slang term for a software application that runs automated tasks over the internet. This could be utterly benign housekeeping, or full-on simulated human behavior.
Turing Test: A test in which a human judge converses via text with one program, and one other human. If the judge can't tell which is the human, then the program is said to pass the Turing Test.
I've got a small enough blog here, that I often get curious about new followers, or Tumblr'rs who "like" my posts... indeed, I've found many of my favorite blogs this way. But lately, I feel like what I'm finding is not quite human.
When I first started on Tumblr, I would stumble across blogs that used the exact same theme as mine (on the default settings) with random seeming titles, no descriptions, and posts consisting of... well, they sounded like ad copy translated to Japanese, and then back to English with a buggy auto-translator.
These blogs did not even try to appear legitimate. I assumed they contained hidden links, or something else to do with search engine optimization. Lately, I feel that I'm still encountering Bots - blogs created by programs - only it's a little more unclear...
I had a couple of "like"s I didn't expect... because they were on posts that wouldn't really appeal to non-followers, or because they were quite old posts. Being curious, I checked out the "likers". Their blogs seemed terse, and slightly word-free (lots of reblogs, most of the words coming from the original posters, with only short, zen-like one liners added on). But they seemed human.
What tipped me off that these were programs and not people was the repeated use of the same zen-like one-liners added to different reblogs on different blogs. "I should consider this" is appended to a reblogged photo on one blog, and to a quote on another.
I haven't seen a lot of this sort of thing, but I'm seeing it a lot lately. I read an article awhile back about a company that created "Weavrs" for you. A Weavr is an artificial human (a program) who maintains a presence on lots of different social media websites (yes, Tumblr too), and I think they are made to emulate the behavior of specific real humans. I wonder if I'm seeing Weavrs.
If so, they're a little less sophisticated than I expected. Even on a network like tumblr, where individuals can get by with very little direct contact... the botness shows through.
That said, I wonder how many bots I've interacted with without knowing about it? Anyone else wondering the same?
Brighton, England. (10 minutes from the Phactory Bar)
Fresh #BotStep - My jam about seeing, urban, anime.
Some of you might be aware of the Jon Ronson battle with Jon_Ronson. Here is some clear(-ish) thinking about what Weavrs (the platform the bot Jon_Ronson was created on) actually are, because the creators of the platform are spectacularly (or possibly intentionally) poor at describing their own work without resorting to nonsense neologisms.
Kiti le Step went onstage with livecoder MCLD, and this is what resulted: noisy deconstructions of dubstep's core components, inflicted live on audiences in Strasbourg and Paris. Beats get broken, basslines get turned into feedback howls, humans and algorithms conspire against sound engineers.
http://chordpunch.com/
"Weavrs are your alter egos crafted from the threads of the social web."
After my last post regarding digital afterlife I was pointed in the direction of a web service called weavrs, which allows you to create avatars which crawl the social web blogging items of interest based on whatever filters or areas of interest you want. I have created one I named Sneakr earlier today, and it has already started to blog, and I have also given it a dedicated twitter account as well.
I'll see over the coming days how useful it is, and hopefully will explore the features of the service in greater detail.