Good evening,
I finally have something a little different to blog about and something uber geek, but boy oh boy is it useful! Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more involved these days and I decided to program something, which was somewhat artificially intelligent. Let’s get to it.
I have been working on some code which would allow one of my blogs to blog by itself based on a number of factors and I have finally got it – my blog blogs, basically :P
My script is not ready for the public just yet, but perhaps in the next week or so it will be. What the script does is it takes on a number of RSS feeds, which it fetches periodically and emails them to my hidden wordpress email account, which in turn blogs the post.
Let me explain more:
- I would choose my RSS feed, such as ‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/Imod’ and plug that into my script via the script control panel.
- I would then setup a cron job to run this script. Now, you will need to study the blog you are going to be reading from, so you know what sort of period to choose to run your cron job. There is functionality to check for double posting of articles of course, but we don’t want a cron job executing continually.
- Each time the cron job executes, it will mail my WordPress email the latest post from the blog which it is fetching the information from. With the script you may choose what to read and how much of it to read.
- This email will be received by the WordPress email account and then blogged onto my blog. Obviously you will need to setup a second cron job for your wp-mail.php file to check the buffer continually.
That’s it! You may add as many RSS feeds as you would like. I tested this out on one of my blogs, it reads from 15 RSS feeds around the Internet every 3 days, so you can imagine the fresh and relavant content being collected on my blog! Obviously each article posted links back to the origonal authors blog post, which will benefit them too, otherwise it would be theft, remember that!!!
Right, well, I was pretty chuffed with the script, what are your views?
hey, thats really neat :)
Thanks a stack. There’s quite a bit more to it with regards to its capabilities like checking content before blogging it, etc. but for now I just wanted to mention it :)
Thanks for popping in, how did you arrive at my blog out of interest?
your page hit #9 on reddit
Oh wow! That’s something rather cool innit! Thanks for posting Alex, means a lot!
That’s great Chris! Must have taken you a while to set all that up?
Wouldn’t this process be considered to be a blog scraper? Or will this type of blog be the top/main blog in a network?
Thanks Louisa – it did take a while.
Wezz.. good question and one which I have been thing about, as I don’t want to be the person to release the next best ‘spam’ machine. Personally, I will be using it for a collection of my own blogs, so ye your guess of top/main blog is very accurate!
Thanks for popping in peeps!
This sounds a lot like WP-o-Matic. Check it out here
Is that what you are doing?
Chris been thinking about it, and what you have essentially created is another tumblr. Why don’t you go the easy route and create a tumblr blog, set it up on your domain and send your feeds to it. Tumblr will work them in as posts. You can also customise your feeds using Yahoo Pipes – removing duplicates etc.
Check out my tumblr (using my Google Reader shared feed, twitter feed, ChumpStyle feed & my Facebook note feed):
http://wezzo.tumblr.com/
Think my previous comment is being moderated because I used links…
Oh, let me take a look, otherwise mail them to me and I will add them..
Miguel, ah ya, similar concept, the only difference is that it is my code and therefore a hell of a lot easier to modify and integrate into other areas :)
Wezz.. I will check Tumblr out!
Sorry mate, but that’s not artificial intelligence. It’s not even close to computational intelligence. Sorry to be harsh, but I mean you’ve basically written a simple RSS aggregator, and since it is blogging the posts to another website, it’s pretty much spam as well. Is the idea to put some Google Ads on the site and try score a bit of free cash?
Programming Fairy, it’s not as simple as it sounds on my post, there are a large collection of other features. The system actually logs tag clouds and makes comparisons so it knows whether it is blogging a related topic. The system also decides on which blog is more relevant to post based on these tag clouds, time of the day, etc. There is actually quite a bit more to it than I stated.
I do see where you are coming from though, with regards to spam, but that is not the intension, but I fear that that is what it will be used for, so I am looking into ways to avoid that.
Google Ads to score a bit of free cash.. haha, making an extra dollar a day through Google’s over done Adsense program really isn’t featuring in my mind at all!
Thanks for your comment! :)
could you comment on whether you consider this fair use? see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
regardless of whether your idea is technically clever, artificial intelligence it definitely is not. see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
it’s ultimately unethical to profit, however indirectly, from content created by others
Even so, intelligence implies a conscious effort to make a decision. The system is taken a set of inputs, applying to it a set of known rules, and then outputting a result. At the end of the day it’s a few if statements that do a pre-programmed task.
Valid point indeed, but if you look at life, everything is based on if statements at the end of the day. The aim of artificial intelligence, well one of them, it to create a machine that thinks like a human – no matter how much information the machine gathers and learns, it will always be performing if statements.
There is always a choice to be made, the severity between choices just differs between emotional strengths of the subject at hand.
A machine will always be programmed, there is no escaping that.
I love this discussion programming fairy!
Ah, but the difference is that an intelligent machine would have no pre-defined if statements, it would in essence evolve from an unordered and undefined set of widgets until it reached a point at which you could possibly label it as conscious. Even at that point it’s very hard to define what you’ve created because it’s all based on a human construct with human assumptions.
And none of that takes into account free will – there might be a set of conditions that make sense and are the best choice, but the ability to not make the correct decision must still exist.
Very true, “the ability to not make the correct decision must still exist” – I couldn’t agree more, and I assure you that my code will not make the correct decision every time ;)
*looks at the windows hosting box*
Elf, I struggle to see the correlation between those articles and what I have done, please elaborate.
I’ve more or less been doing nothing worth mentioning. I can’t be bothered with anything recently. Nothing seems important. Nothing notable going on lately, but shrug. I haven’t gotten much done these days. Not much on my mind to speak of.