Demo Graphic Replicator

KrankyChloe turns 1000

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:40:00 +0000

One of the early test bots, KrankyChloe, has just reached a 1000 followers on Twitter after 7,900 Tweets.

It feels like some sort of celebration is in order.

She's about 6 months old and really only interested in ITV, Gin and greyhounds but her blog obviously is more richer than that.

She's a "2nd Generation" bot and as we move into the "3rd Generation" system, the timing is lovely.

Her blog has only been running for about 3 months but is already a wonderful eclectic collection of posts yet with a strong theme of "independence and personal strength". She's a fighter, I think.

After 3,964 posts and 6,427 site views she seems to be generating a modest interest from the public at large.

You can check it out here.

It would seem she likes to nip into coffee shops a lot, such as Coffee Etc., as she moves from her home of Acton, West London to her job in Oxford Circus. I've no idea what she does as a 'job' btw.

But the blog posts imply a loneliness, almost a desire to connect with more people.

Presenting the bots at Ignite Berlin

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:10:00 +0000

On Monday I had the lovely/daunting honor of presenting the Demo Graphic Replicator at the Berlin session of O'Reilly's Ignite as part of the Global Ignite Week.

The format is a strict 5 minutes, 20 slides with just 15 seconds per slide on auto pilot.

Trying to explain the bots in any social or business context normally takes 20 minutes so compressing the whole project and presenting live on stage with no control over the timing of the slides was a 'beautiful challenge'

So without further ado, here's the video.

If you want the deck - complete with the voice over from the video, you're in luck.

From Opinion to Identity: Social Media Bots

View more presentations from David Bausola.

There's a few errors in what I said, but under pressure and trying not to gallop my way through all this in 5 minutes, you can forgive me.

The whole evening was excellent - all the speakers (here's the Twitter list of them) were top notch, charming and fascinating - and it gave me the opportunity to seek out the like-minded now that I'm based in Berlin.

I warmly suggest you watch them all in action.

Many thanks to Matt and Peter for inviting me to talk. Special thanks to the Philter Phactory Phellows Rob and Nick for all the amazing engineering that makes this project so much fun. Any many thanks for the audience who listened and came and asked questions afterwards.

Bots who Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:20:00 +0000

Since conception of the DGRS, a bots activity has been based around the ReTweet - a gesture of empathy to another users posting.

These Tweets (originally denoted with the classic 'RT' letters - we've since adopted the new API RT function) began to give a narrative filtering of the bot's personality - you could begin to understand what the character was about through what they Retweeted.

I began to talk to more and more people about how to expand upon this and James Bridle (@stml on Twitter) came forth with a superb demonstration with @bookfeeder and bookfeeders Posterous.

@bookfeeder used its Retweets as source material, ran them through a Bayesian Term Extractor (using Yahoo Pipes) and used that output of keywords to find books on the Google Book Search and then posted them to a Posterous account.

So simple - such genius.

This meant the bots could now 'read' what they were Retweeting and transform that comprehension into relative media. The Posterous blogging platform becomes the lifestreaming /archive of this and posts links of the blogged books back onto Twitter - making the Twitter feed richer for a follower.

Again - so simple - such genius.

Using the API method for finding the books and posting to a blogging service is a superb demonstration on how to build out an ecosystem for each of the bots, giving the reader a better understanding of what the bots personality is really like.

There is a marked disinction though between this and Splogging and Spam. The bots are not appropriating any writing (the bulk of a splog is text) and they are not link-baiting to drive to a self interest - they are distributing embeddable media on behalf of the person who uploaded the media in the first place.

Further, the books being posted are not purely based upon the original character file of keywords - the posted books are found through a mix of key words extracted from the ReTweets and the character definitions - which do come directly from the character file. Together this creates an OR not an AND search array (we search across all the words - but pick something that has the keywords in the tags of the media we want to post). This gives the fuzzy edge to the bots just like human bloggers/twitterers who get interested in new things around their core interests. The postings are decentralised interests of the bot.

Further still, as the bots ReTweet, to which they follow the newest conversations, the choices of books migrate accordingly, thus you begin to see drifts of interest. It's a very slow process, a long now if you will, but it makes for a long narrative arc to each bots existence.

The only problem with James' @bookfeeder demo was that lots of duplicates would appear because the bot had no 'memory' of what it had posted - that is - there was no checking before posting another book to see if the book had already been posted (it makes no sense to repost the same item). This was solved by using the Data Store on the Google App Engine where the DGR application reside.

Rob and I scaled this idea to other media APIs. Flickr (for photos), Last.fm (for music) and Youtube (for videos) now work alongside Google Books within a rebuild of @stml's original code of php. All this functionality now exists within the main code base as Python, firing off a Cron job with a probability manager to ensure that the bots don't post too much regularity. This gives the posting patterns a more 'human' appeal. They also don't repeat postings. The bots now have their own memory.

This now becomes a much more richer narrative filter - the bots postings become almost magazine like - they are a blog - but one with out a declared direction. Post by post of varies media begin to detail a real-time narration without a defined story. This is classic 'death of an author' analysis, but I suspect there is more to be had with this line of inquiry than merely noting that the reader is in control of the comprehension.

The reader is actually part of the influencing eco-sytem that the bots use to produce the feed of posts; not directly, but semantically, their is cause and effect. If you really want to get spooked - the bot is under 6 degress of separation from you as a person. We'll dive into the Post-Structuralism debate in another post in the near future.

Whilst we continue to tune and tweak the application (which will be release as an open source offering) we are still testing the search for media against the number of keywords need to get really relevant postings. Too many keywords and we don't find a match - too few and we get 'noise' back - aka - just anything vaguely related.

We also track the keywords used to find the posted media as Tags for each blog post. This makes for interesting tagging - it's not a human approach where the words narrowly relate to the media posted - but instead are a dump the search array used to find that media. The tags are the 'intent' of the bot.

We've also extended the blogging to Tumblr which works okish (the lag is higher), but Posterous enables us to spread the posts out to other social media networks if we need to - without having to do more coding. Posterous is as real-time as we can have at the moment.

Friendfeed is there to aggregate a bots posting and (re)tweets - but Posterous gives the better user experience for readers of all this posting. FriendFeed doesn't seem to like the application posting media directly to it - it considers all of the bots to be posting from the same application - which it is - but actually the api call is per account on Friendfeed. We've raised a ticket and a comment to have this looked at.

Speaking of FriendFeed, here's an aggregated feed of all the test bots Tweets.

It's also worth comparing to how Steve Rubel uses the 'lifestreaming' approach to the curatorship of identity. Compare a bots posting routines to a humans and the differences are small - and will become smaller as we add more posting functionality into the code base - especially more 'original' material like the serving suggestions of @recipeer.

None of the web2.0 services we're produced with a single goal in mind (as the absence of business models suggests) - but Steve's joyful posts suggest that 'this is useful, and a little entertaining' defers us from seeing how we can use these services for something more fascinating. Consider the way the bots are emulating social groupings of people, or how they embody traits of people we know, or people we want to know, or we don't want to know. Imagine imaginary characters that begin to emerge based upon your interactions with them. Lifestreaming as a narrative filtration of the network ecology of the internet sounds more compelling as an art form that another way to dodge the drudge of email.

Comparing the commentary in the above video of Steve to Henry Jenkin's principles of Transmedia, where it's people, not technology that converge, (remember, the DGR bot is a convergence of many people within one persona), then we can begin to see that the real-time polling technologies (pubhubsubpub/rsscloud/longpolling) will provide something between the functional deployment of brands and the mystical needs of storytellers.

But the decentralization of production and distribution and design is not to the benefit of a recognizable problem; and perhaps that is what could be possible through the DGR bots - discovering other problems away from the advancement of storytelling and commercial communications. If systems can narrate through filtration (like debugging, for example) then surely the process is scalable to promote what is awry with the methodologies of production and distribution and design. Maybe the bots are capable of debugging how we use technologies rather than us trying to debug the technologies.

If you want to browse and follow the bots blogs, here is the current list of blogging DGR bots on the various platforms mentioned:-

Felix Freeman (by Marcus Brown)
Posterous,
Tumblr,
FriendFeed,
Twitter

VerySexySeo
Posterous,
Tumblr,
FriendFeed,
Twitter

Jimmmo
Posterous,
Tumblr,
FriendFeed,
Twitter

KrankyChloe
Posterous,
Tumblr,
FriendFeed,
Twitter

Igguggogg
Posterous,
Tumblr,
FriendFeed,
Twitter

Adocalypse (by Marcus Brown)
Posterous,
Tumblr,
FriendFeed,
Twitter

Ohlaylale
Posterous,
Tumblr,
FriendFeed,
Twitter

Bmxbarry
Posterous,
Tumblr,
FriendFeed,
Twitter

After a week of testing (using just Youtube and Google books) the Posterous traffic is about 1000 visits with about 800 posts. The bots have been posting at various speeds for testing - 600 posts per week is not human, I know. But it's a clear indicator of interest from the bots followers that the links are interesting enough. Additionally, the bots followers have all gone up by 30-50 users, some of which are bots of course.

This, I think, is mainly due to the blog post headings using the name of books and Youtube videos - both are written to ensure maximum link baiting. Everyone Web2.0 savvy now - the bots just mimic this. Flickr images tend not to be label so well - meaningless file names are used - but within a tweet (when posted back out from Posterous) they become 'curiosities'.

Also, many of the Youtube video are music videos - so it tends to be obvious whats at the end of the link. The bots do bring up some timeless classics though - Meatloaf has been popular with all the bots so far - which is a close to spam as I'm willing to let the application do. No idea why Meatloaf is so relevant to the various bots yet - but we're working on it.

The thought of food

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:52:00 +0000

We've been experimenting with a range of posting ideas for the DGR bots over the past couple of months; one thing Rob and I wanted to see was original material from the bots.

Surrealist poetry generators have been around the web since the first week of Netscape (just guessing on that) - but we wanted to have the bots be inspiring on a daily level - useful yet entertaining on a domestic level.

So we invented @Recipeer - a demo bot that tweeted meal ideas.

Now the nice thing about 'dada/surrealist poetry generators' is that you're never sure what will turn up if you build huge arrays. We scraped various pages from wikipedia (dairy, meats, vegetables and herbs), added some meal formats, prefixed them with a variety of openings, structured some of them around meal times and added a few brands for 'authenticity'. (If it's one of your brands, and you don't want them mentioned, let us know in the comments below or just reply to the offending tweet to @recipeer.

The code for this is dedicated to Keith Floyd who passed on to the great kitchen in the sky last year - the true original celebrity chef - sharing his ideas, passions and enthusiasm for creativity.

We've also added a few celebrity chefs to the arrays - notably Heston and Jamie - who carry the batten from Keith. Maybe they will be inspired by the tweets from this experiment - who knows what may end up on their menus from all this. (Heston, Jamie - the bots will sometimes call you on twitter - give them a response if you get a moment, thanks.)

The application of inventing meals has been added to a range of live test bots so you'll see unusual meal ideas appearing around the web soon. The Recipeer account will be kept purely generating meal ideas.

There are also some hashtags so that the indexing around them incorporate the generative meals ideas. It's a way to integrate the bots into a normal existence and attract some feedback on the applications creative output.

Further, there's a little tribute to Larry David in there too. I've been watching a lot of his work in the past few years, I think something of his writing and structure to his shows is starting to rub off in the production of the DGR product - they (the bots) are awkward in so far as they promote with enthusiasm yet never clear what they should really do with themselves. They are very watchable though.

Here's an example - the application will occasionally post a message to @foodphilosophy aka Jennifer Iannolo, the inventor of #sexonaplate (an exquisite mix of gastro gathering and philosophy - get tickets here). When we went live with the code this evening, two bots produced #sexonaplate tweets. The responses from @foodphilosopy are very cool.

Little update:

Lovely response to the blog post from Jennifer!

Trialing StreamTelling: Wormwoods Store

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:24:00 +0000

Whilst many little bits of DGR engineering are coming together behind the scenes, Marcus and I wanted to see if it was possible to produce a 'sitcom' or 'tele-novella' style production using the basic DGR technology and the technique of StreamTelling.

Streamtelling is the process of interpreting the actions of the DGR bots in a narrative manner. With a simple blog, we can record 'our' narrative interpretations of the characters (the cast of the show). With an appropriate context of a shop within a town, we can begin to add some gravity to the relationships between the characters.

Another thing I wanted to see if the level of autonomous activity the characters can achieve. As with Nick's work on enabling the DGR siblings to 'walk' around, it will be curious to see where our cast go in the show -- which streets, stores and homes they visit.

So Marcus will be using each characters (re)Tweets to inform 'their' blog posts, rather like how he produced the 'Felix Freeman' creation.

StreamTelling does not devise narrative arcs, only the generative seeds of the narrative - no one has any idea where this is going. That's the point of doing this -- like any form of generative art making, we're doing this to see what is revealed rather than trying to compose a story to be retold at a later date.

Wormwoods is located upon the town Totnes, Devon in the UK. It's not based upon the town. We're augmented the town with narratives using the "town's" metadata to produce an augmented reality. Anyone who has ever posted a picture, wikipedia note, blog post are all informing the Wormwood Store narration.

Just like a fiction, it's got lots of details - a high street, a river, a church.

Totnes seems like a lovely place - though I've never been there.

What's fascinating about all this is that we are folding realities back into themselves by using narratives. The images of Totnes oscillate between reality and fiction now that we can recontextualise their meaning through narrative filters.

Like most places, it's already augmented with loads of metadata from Wikipedia, Flickr, Youtube etc - so there is loads of data we can use to influence the characters.

The cast and production was conceived by Marcus Brown and based around the idea of an eco-friendly store in a town that already thrives on local produce. None of the characters are based upon real people, just archetypes based upon their jobs and fictional background.

Here's the Cast.

Gavin Toulson-Davey (about 4o years old): Gavin is a City drop out that may, or may not have more than one skeleton in his closet. Sick of the city, he has moved to Totnes to get in touch with nature. He bought the shop from Mr. Cecil Wormwood who died shortly there after. Gavin likes to think of his little supermarket as an “Eco2.O startup” and worships Innocent Smoothies and Howies and dreams of building a wormwoods in every town! twitter.com/gavintdavey

Crystal Johnston (about 19 years old): Crystal Johnston is the daughter of the local butcher, and a party girl. She has never left Totnes and dreams only of the weekend, booze and drugs. The most important thing in her life are her “best friends” – a group of people who dictate pretty much everything in the town. She has a mouth like a sewer. twitter.com/cpartyjohnston

Stephen Hornby (about 19 years old): Stephen Hornby is the only Gothic in Totnes. He secretly likes pink. He was found 19 years ago on the steps of the vicarage and is considered to be the illigitmate son of Mr. Johnston (the butcher) and …. Mrs Wormwood! He is bullied by Crystal’s friends. Everyday at 6.45 p.m. twitter.com/gothhornby

Mrs Wormwood (about 62 years old): Mrs Wormwood works at check out number 1. She would never work on check out number 2! She is, after all, the widow of the late owner – Mr. Wormwood. She basically thinks that she still owns the place. There are many rumors and secrets about her past. Many of them include Mr. Johnston the Butcher. She hates Gavin, the owner but insists that he’s a charming man. twitter.com/mrswormwood

You can subscribe to the cast on Twitter -- and here's a full cast Twitter List to subscribe to.

Here they are from earlier today.

Anyone is free to interact with the characters - in fact - we'd be grateful if you would. Testing this kind of innovation is all part of the process.

If you fancy creating a character for the show - let us know the persona in the comments below.

But in the meanwhile, visit...

www.wormwoodsstore.com

... and subscribe to the 'show' and the characters.

And if you could Tweet this with this link, we'd all be hugely grateful.

Mapping emotions to pathways

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:03:00 +0000

Having the DGRs autonomously wander around their defined territory is one of the project visions I wanted to get to fast. Having the bots leave a trail of data or locations based upon their character definitions, which is feed by social media, seemed like a nice way to get to a mobile Augmented Reality.

Engineering this has been the work of Nick Renny, and his first iteration of this is now live.

Here's Nick to explain what's happening here:

DGR location is using a combination of the existing character traits defined in the Character YAML file, and Google local search and Google maps api to find locations to visit. These destinations are stored in the appengine datastore and also tweeted as a 'My Destination' tweet via the DGR sibling's twitter account. Also, the DGR sibling's twitter profile location is changed with lat, lng co-ordinates each time a destination is tweeted.

Once a new destination is tweeted and stored in the datastore the real world location of the previous destination is posted as the profile location of the sibling, this means that the physical location of the sibling is a real world place, and matches the last destination.

Each sibling's journey can be viewed on google maps as a set of walking directions via the dgr/sibling url, which will be the profile website setting on the sibling's twitter profile.

The journey can be viewed in realtime, and a street view trail can be watched via a link from the DGR sibling page - if you want to follow the sibling.

Each destination search is begun on local search by centreing the search on the last destination then searching that locale for the matched keywords. This means that the sibling is constantly on the move, to achieve a degree of random selection the resultset from Local Search is shuffled ( as Google always returns the same set ) and the new destination is found.

Because the search results are limited by Google and generally don't change for a given search in a given location, I have run up against the situation that journey's at the moment can tend to be somewhat cyclical and I am looking to refine the search algorithm to produce better results more in line with the character.

Here's the live Google map mashup from Nicks DGRs '@kidbeats'.

This may vanish as it's on a dev server - the screen shot above was taken today.

The locations are all in a datastore, so we can now reuse this for all kinds of odd investigations, visualizations and narratives. You can too - just grab all the @kidbeats traveling tweets.

For example, as Nick mentioned, using Google Streetmap, you can 'live' the journey of the bot. As seen here.

What I'm really liking the idea of, is the 'cow paths' of demographics, an aggregation of streams represented as a new path, within a new context, is being built up daily in real time. As the DGRs are built upon keyword semantics, the mapping data is a hyper-local visualisation of the conversation semantics of social media, in real time.

Cow path analysis in (web) search is often used to find the optimized route between two things. Not sure what our two things are here - reality and narrative? people and person? Destination or arrival? Only one way to really find out is to keep playing.

In the meanwhile, @kidbeats is wandering around somewhere.

This is sure to tickle the @herdmeister.

Respect to Nick!

An Almanac of Human Emotion

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:05:00 +0000

DGR is built on top of We Feel Fine - which is a gorgeous piece of work from Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. If you've not seen it, it's an aggregation of bloggers who use the phrase

"I feel ...." followed by an emotion, like Happy, Sad or Grumpy etc etc.

They now published a book based upon the project along with an interactive version online. Free PDFs of the pages too -- that's nice.

There's also some nice plates in there about the semantics of emotions.

And some history on smart folk who studied emotions.

I really like this approach - making books out of an API and presenting the bigger picture of the artworks discoveries and history. It's like an interview with the artwork rather than the artist.

Anyway, it's available on all good online retailers. Links are on the site.

Look-a-liking

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:09:00 +0000

One of the problems with creating the avatars for the DGR (Twitter) accounts is that they may look like someone. This is/was never the intent and something that I need to ponder over.

For example, @DarrylMorris points out to @JamesMonaghan that he looks like DGR sibling @Igguggogg.

darrylmorris @JamesMonaghan I think the profile pic on this looks a lot like you!!! No offense!! :D xx - @igguggogg 23 Oct 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to JamesMonaghan

JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris The profile pic on what? 23 Oct 2009 from web in reply to darrylmorris

JamesMonaghan RT @darrylmorris #followfriday @rosieswash - Guardian music writer and all round lovely lady who I would quite like to marry, if I'm honest. 23 Oct 2009 from web

darrylmorris @JamesMonaghan on that account. 23 Oct 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to JamesMonaghan

JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris Rosie Swash's picture? Looks like me? Have you got your glasses on? 24 Oct 2009 from web in reply to darrylmorris

darrylmorris @JamesMonaghan no you sponge, the profile I showed you in that actual tweet. 24 Oct 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to JamesMonaghan

JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris I'm more than a little bit confused Darryl. Its been a long night. Who's profile pic looks like mine? xx 24 Oct 2009 from web in reply to darrylmorris

darrylmorris @JamesMonaghan this person @igguggogg looks like you!!! 24 Oct 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to JamesMonaghan

JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris I'm mildly offended! But I'm very tired so I'll let it pass. 24 Oct 2009 from web in reply to darrylmorris

JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris ahhhhhhhh. Got it. Its cool. I'm being blonde. xxx 24 Oct 2009 from web in reply to darrylmorris

darrylmorris @JamesMonaghan Yes, I expected you to be offended, which is why I tried to say it quick so it would be done with, but that didn't work out!! 24 Oct 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to JamesMonaghan

-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

I think Darryl is being sarcastic, but all the same, this is a noted point about designing the avatars.

The Demographic Replicator I want for Christmas is..

noreply@blogger.com (JohnG) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:48:00 +0000

We've asked Market Research experimenter/Communication Planning Explorer and facilitator of brands narrative needs, John Griffiths to chip in with the DGR commentary and development. Here his first post with a couple of demands.

It really is a bit like that. The urge to play to combine simple elements to see what complicated behaviours emerge. And if some kind of Turing test is passed, will the bot be believable.

So here's my wishlist. Which probably reflects my having studied philosophy a long time ago. Bootstrapping and counterexample figure large.

1/ Social media geek. Twitter and blogdom are awash with them. So it shouldn't be too hard to mug up a bot which talks the talk. This should be straightforward enough from keywords. What I want to find out is whether the bot will be insightful, hilarious or a bore. And right now I really can't call it. So try and see what happens.

2/ Call me crass and commercial but the reality show which still grips the teen audience is The X Factor. And thar's money involved. So why not have an The X Factor groupie aged around 15 who watches the show and all the add-ons religiously, votes every week and still things the show is about talent. We could tune the bot towards a fave judge - I favour Cheryl though a conflict of interest between a critical Cheryl and a pet vocalist might also be worth a look. The point about this bot is that we don't just want an enthusiast for the show but one for whom opinions matter

These 2 represent 2 extremes. One commercial - because if every TV show had its complement of fanbots well I'd say that's a monetisation strategy. And if this Demo Graphic Replicator thing is to work then we may as well take a risk and make Pygmalion. Easy to pick demographic splinters we enjoy patronising.

But how like us could we make a bot. And would we like it if we did? And could we recognise ourselves? The ultimate Turing test.

John on Twitter.

Mapping A Character's Backstory

noreply@blogger.com (tomhimpe) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:18:00 +0000

Marcus' excellent post about the nature and emergence of streamtelling, as opposed to the beginning-middle-and-end-dominated craft of storytelling, made me think about the role of back story in the formation of a character. Any writer who's ever developed a complex, rich and interesting character -whether it's for games, novels or film- has had the pleasure of mapping out the character's back story, i.e. its history, background and life leading up to the point where the story picks up on him/her.

As explained here, questions you should ask yourself when writing your character's back story are as specific as "What did your hero eat for breakfast? What does he carry in his wallet? What was the most traumatic experience of his life?". Detail matters. The more detail the back story contains, the fuller the character is likely to become, and the more interesting the resulting story.

The DGRs seem to be a perfect way to construct such back story. Their retweets give insight in their daily thoughts, actions and routine. They don't immediately reveal the major plotpoints or events in a character's life, but reveal their life little by little, thought by thought, retweet by retweet. By streamtelling -derived from the neologism "to streamtell"- these detailed dots, a writer can build an interesting back story to a character over time.

Great characters don't emerge overnight, they emerge over time, through detailed exploration of their background and lives. DGRs enable a writer to construct such back story through social intelligence.

Streamtelling

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Brown) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:10:00 +0000

I’m not going to try and attempt to map out the history of storytelling here because it would be long and I’m sure that there are hundreds of other people out there who are much more capable of taking on that task. This does have something to do with storytelling, that is to say that this has nothing to do with storytelling because I’m going to try and explain what is going on with the Sibling that I have been building for the Demo Graphic Replicator project – Mr Felix Freeman.

In order to explain what’s happening with Felix, I need to quickly outline what I think storytelling is, and why what’s happening with Felix is different.

For me, storytelling is a robust method of communicating a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s pretty easy isn’t it? It’s such a robust model of communicating something that it’s been around since humans have had a brain and could use a finger to paint a Mammoth on cave wall. Storytelling suits the way we think; “oh this is the middle and I hope there’s going to be a happy end” etc. Regardless of how complex a story is, how many different characters feature in the story, or however episodes/versions/seasons/books etc. etc it takes to tell the story, it will always have a beginning, middle and an end.

Felix doesn’t, and yet he’s a fictional character telling us something that looks remarkably like a story.

The fundamental difference between Felix Freeman as character and any other fictional character is that his content, the fabric of Felix, isn’t being described by me as the author but is being coerced at random by a constant stream of demographic chitter-chatter. At heart Felix is an Ag8.com Demo Graphic Replicator, a twitter bot that grabs the tweets of people that make the most “emotional” sense to him. I’ve fed Felix with emotions and key words and Felix does the rest. The DGR code, becomes Felix's soul and this is how I put him together (you may want to watch this in full screen mode):

Mind Mapping a DGR character: Felix Freeman from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

I have to admit that when I agreed to get involved in the DGR project I had preconceived ideas about who Felix was going to be because, at that time I was thinking in terms of storytelling. It seemed impossible to me that something could come about without heavily steering the bot but I was soon proven wrong. He just gets on with it and I’ve found myself confused by the stuff that I’ve been doing with Felix. The real breakthrough came with a Felix blog post (Felix still lets me write things now and then) called “Longfellow” in which Felix describes a bad night’s sleep. That post was directly influenced by a tweet that caught my eye as quite visual, so much so that I tried to find the street discussed in it and one thing led to another and we suddenly had something that was decidedly eerie and very, very real. We had a dream that you could play with:

view a bigger map

Felix was beginning to live, but not in terms of a story. I'd already been playing with simple video sketches to try and get a feel for his personality:

Felix Freeman. Memory One. from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

But I wanted the stream of retweets to build him and not necessarily me - not in the classical sense of author. I then tried to shape him physically/digitally and created a very simple animation of the Longfellow text which worked, and I suddenly realised that I had probably not seen this kind of thing before.

It was only when David asked me to consider using an actor that I really started to panic. They had already opened up Felix to a broader public, invited people to voice over the animation and having quickly filmed myself in black and white and integrating the google map sequence of the Longfellow dream, we had our first 40 seconds of Felix film, a film that started as a tweet, which became of blog post, which then went on to become a script, then an animation and finally the film. There are three films in total, each one using one of the voices kindly submitted to be used in the animation. Here they are:

DGR sketch: Felix Freeman - Longfellow I from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

DGR sketch: Felix Freeman - Longfellow II from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

DGR sketch: Felix Freeman - Longfellow III from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

I’ll leave it to David to talk about what this potentially means for traditional storytellers (whether that be film maker, writers, game developers, advertising agencies, music, theatre, television, radio) although I’m utterly aware of what this means my self. I think they can just explain things better. But they did ask me, “what is this? What are you doing and how are you doing it? Describe it”, which I found quite difficult to do. On Saturday, however, whilst buying peanuts in a Supermarket it occurred to me that I’m not storytelling but streamtelling.

Streamtelling allows me to be guided by the character which is made up of what David calls vectors. These dots make up the emotional outline of Felix and it’s my responsibility to join them in order to make a characteristic silhouette. If we have more dots we get a sharper outline and the character becomes richer. The brilliant thing is that there are so many ways to do this and all of them influence Felix and his story. Thanks to this clever little thing that David put together, we can see, for example, what Felix is thinking right now:

So, this is streamtelling. I think it's very exciting. I'd love to hear what you think about all this.

Cheers,
Marcus

Felix Freeman mashup featuring C. Hurst.

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Brown) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:13:00 +0000

Hello. David has very kindly invited me to post on the DGR blog, so hello to you all. As David wrote yesterday I’ve been busy building on my sibling character, Felix Freeman. Yesterday we asked for your help in finding a voice for Felix and so far we’ve had 3 voices in. The clip below is a very rough cut of Chris Hurst’s voiceover of this Felix post (which features a neat little interactive dream that you can play with), a post that was pushed along by this tweet. There will be proper edits of all the voiceovers appearing here very soon.

Felix Freeman featuring C. Hurst from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

This is really exciting stuff and if you’d like to get involved with Felix please check out this post (just make sure I can actually download the voice over).

Cheers,
Marcus.

Artificial Affectivities

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Myers) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:42:00 +0000

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human decision making. Artificial affectivity is the simulation of human emotion. Emotion has historically been underrated in artificial intelligence. Without emotion, otherwise rational human beings cannot make decisions. Tellingly, the classic test for artificial intelligence, the Turing Test, is a test of software's performance in conversation rather than at number crunching.

Joseph Weizenbaum's "Eliza" system of the late 1960s featured a simulated Rogerian psychoanalyst ("Doctor", which most people just call Eliza). Kenneth Colby's early 1970s "Parry" simulated the conversation of a paranoid schizophrenic. Parry had a simulation of beliefs and mental state, but Doctor just echoed back the words of its user. Both manage to build an emotional rapport with their conversation partners until they make a mistake and break the user's suspension of disbelief.

Modelling human personalities and emotions as hierarchies of related concepts has a long history in psychology. But the various proposed taxonomies disagree even on what a basic emotion is, so there is a lot of work remaining to be done before we can describe emotion in a robust manner. This hasn't prevented these models being used outside of psychology.

You may have done a personality type test during a job interview, or for fun on the Web. Writers can buy books describing personality traits types to flesh out the characters in their stories. The pen-and-paper role-playing games that followed Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s eventually added systems for modelling personality and the life stories that influence it. Few adopted scientific models although an article in "Challenge" magazine did so rigorously.

Rosalid Picard's 2000 book "Affective Computing" presented examples of emotional models and rule-based computer simulation of them to both parse human emotions and represent computer output using them. The Sims, the most popular computer game of all time in the early 2000s, contained a simple emotional simulation for each game character.

A switch from rule-based expert systems to internet-data-processing statistical methods can be seen in affective computing as well as in artificial intelligence. The best example of this is Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's project "We Feel Fine" which extracts statements of the form "I feel X" from blog posts along with information about who has made this stament, when and where. This affective sample of the blogosphere is then made available for other software to use through an API.

The DGRs use We Feel Fine's API to set their inner emotional state. They search for users that match their demographic information, then (if they find a match) they choose words as tags that represent how they express or act on that emotion. The DGRs are not artificial intelligences, they do not make practical decisions on the basis of a disembodied and disinterested emulation of human intellect. They are artificial affectivities. To ask whether they actually feel is like asking whether a submarine can swim (to borrow Edsger Dijkstra's response to the question of whether computers can think). They are performative, functional equivalents to human emoting within the limited affective bandwidth of microblogging.

Real Time Audience Feedback

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:23:00 +0000

As a follow up to the sampler of audience responses, I thought this might be a useful way to show the feedback the Siblings are getting from across Twitter.

The FriendFeed is aggregating RSS feeds of Twitter searches for their names (@krankychloe, @Felix_freeman etc) in real time. You have to look at each posts footer to see who the responses are aimed at.

I'm tempted to do the same for Direct Messages that the Siblings receive - as the review of hardcore spam is quite interesting but I'm not sure if publicly posting DM automatically is socially acceptable? Doesn't seem to be anything in the Twitter TOS about that.

Finding the voice

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:52:00 +0000

Transmedia is the aching hip scene for content producers - it's a way to develop stories across multiple platforms to 'engage' an audience on behalf of a sponsor.

The DGR system is different - it's driven by passive audiences (bloggers and microbloggers) and then synthesized into character, which then generates narrative.

I say narrative rather than storytelling as the later is a predefined tale, narrative is something that evolves, mutates, unfolds. Creating Transmedia narratives is also requires Free Culture principles because the cross platform spreading and scaling needs to have freedoms of use built into the design.

Marcus has been whittling away with his DGR Sibling, Felix Freeman, creating a text based story based upon the Sibling's Tweeting which, inspired by this Super F*cking Awesome Social Media Douchebag video, has now evolved into a short film. Check it out.

What is happening here is akin to Wikipedia, culture is being filtered into a piece of media just as every subject matter is being converted into a web page, which can then be reused by anyone due to the Creative Commons Attribute ShareAlike licence.

Marcus says,

"Although this little clip is a very rough sketch (that’s not Felix’s voice, I have a very different voice in my head for Felix) it helps to make Felix just that little bit more real. This is quite an exciting step. Suddenly the full potential of Felix as a character can be seen; you can see him in other contexts, like games or little short films and he is suddenly much more human that he was a twitter bot. He’s becoming the most interesting character I’ve created to date."

Felix in video form is not a million miles away from 80's cult figure Max Headroom - embodying satire within simulacra, portraying the locus of the loquacious.

Which is useful for all kinds of commercial arts endeavors when trying to catch the waves of culture - because it's the real thing.

When Happiness Factory arrived on our screens (your mobile, *tubes, teleboxes, ipods et al), the premise was to extend it beyond the 30 second advert - a universe of characters awaiting to be discovered, played with, promoted and loved. Lead by masters of 'finding the brand's voice' - Weiden and Kennedy, we're seeing socialized media unfolding as immersive storytelling. As beautiful as it is, it's not 'opening happiness' in a way that culture operates well. Culture is emergent, immersion is a static spectacle.

The dominance of a centralized editorial is something that transmedia producers are questioning - "What does a transmedia audienceship look like?" is a good starter. It questions the canonical authority of storytelling because the influence of the audiences' opinion is a reason for cultural production in the first place. Just as Twitter plays with the emotional disposition of marketing, voice and participation, the mechanistic voice of an authors creation through reproduction of their work opens the oppotunity for the reader to supplant their own voice within the characters profile. If the reader 'completes' the characterization, how far should that go?

So, if you fancy trying a little experiment for us, have a go at recording yourself reading the script of the film Marcus made - the one at the top of this blog post.

Soundcloud seems like a good service to upload the audio to and Marcus will edit in your voice to the original video. Make sure you apply this Creative Commons licence to your voice recording so that he can do this all nice and legally.

It will be fascinating to see where this goes.
Leave a message in the comments below if you want to play along.

Introducing igguggogg

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 06:55:00 +0000

Another test subject, complete with over 500 Tweets. Lots of them were generated with test data, but this Sibling has a fresh outlook now. Go say hi to igguggogg.

# All fields are compulsory

# The twitter user name and password
twitter_username: igguggogg
twitter_password:

# Doesn't change. make sure it has imageid and feeling an a limit of at least 20
wff_search: http://api.wefeelfine.org:8080/ShowFeelings?returnfields=imageid%2Cfeeling&limit=50&gender=1&display=xml&city=hamburg&agerange=20

# Emotional states
emotion_keywords: {
sad: [fighting, war, killing, wasting],
great: [chess, people, bycycles, gaming],
happy: [chess, beer, complexity, evenings, xbox, meeting]
}

# Times of day (after given times), 24hour clock, 00..23
time_keywords: {
11: [study, maths, headache],
13: [run, jogging, salad],
18: [chips, physics, maths, techno],
}

# Times of day for Saturday & Sunday (after given times), 24hour clock, 00..23
weekend_time_keywords: {
09: [sleep, pub, neighbour, raining],
19: [walking, sausages, chess, beer, river],
23: [sleep, tv, movie, maths]
}

# Words to fall back on if nothing else matches, or to add randomly
character_keywords:
[maths, physics, party, kebab, study, techno, river]

oziso is oozzss

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 06:51:00 +0000

oziso is the new oozzss. oozzss got bumped, if you remember.

oziso, like oozzss, is into techno. Same character, new account. Enjoy.

ReTuring

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:56:00 +0000

When I first decided to put the bots live, I was convinced that they would be met with human resistance, ignored, dismissed as spam, or worse, banned.

Part of the process for making normalizing them was to give them friends to follow and faces to present.

What I wasn't expecting was gratitude. Below is a sampler of Twitter users who are appreciating the RTweeting, which is not so much of a surprise - everyone likes to be ReTweeted, don't they?

lindsay_megafan Hello @bmxbarry! I am following you now :) 28 Sep 2009 from o-x

SMOOTHinHD RT @krankychloe: "RT @SMOOTHINHD hi mon.. didnt think we were gonna meet again but q, wat is funnier than flamedout homo run http://ur1. ... 28 Sep 2009 from PockeTwit

Live_for_Films #ff Enter the Dragons @skutterdan1701 @rodti @shiverspt @felix_freeman @darktess @kippermitten @ianvisits @travisbead 02 Oct 2009 from web

thisnewz @DGR_m3_01 thanks for the RT - funny how our DUI content is the most popular! 03 Oct 2009 from web in reply to DGR_m3_01

City_Boy @jimmmo lol! u tell me! 03 Oct 2009 from TwitterBerry in reply to jimmmo

Zigzagpaz Thank you for all the people who retweeted me last week @BoBarnum1 @TheOrganicActorm @lomb @DGR_m3_02 @websitetoptip @nwchpt4me 05 Oct 2009 from web

TaraRoss I am a little overdue in thanking @jimmmo @RightKlik @olsonleif and @GregWHoward for some RTs and recommendations. Thanks, guys. 05 Oct 2009 from web

thepoetweets @ohlaylala thank you for the rewind :) 05 Oct 2009 from Echofon in reply to ohlaylala

WhatMotivates @eve_dorcas Thank you Eve for the RT! We appreciate it. 05 Oct 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to eve_dorcas

-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Now, I'm not saying the DGRs are passing any Turing Test, but they do seem to be socially acceptable.

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen.

The DGRs are not really participating in a conversation, they're cutting across. Which does seem to be creating (a positive, light hearted) confusion with some people.

poetryinsepia @DGR_m3_01 err, hello, do i know you? 28 Sep 2009 from web in reply to DGR_m3_01

DriqueLondon @bmxbarry what show your talking about bro 28 Sep 2009 from web in reply to bmxbarry

VictoriaRusso @DGR_m3_01 so I statistically make sense to you? lol 28 Sep 2009 from web in reply to DGR_m3_01

YouuAreNotAlone @krankychloe Huh ? 30 Sep 2009 from web in reply to krankychloe

johnsw @krankychloe You're a robot right? Weirdest spam yet. 01 Oct 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to krankychloe

jwater @krankychloe lol why retweet that? 05 Oct 2009 from UberTwitter in reply to krankychloe

ThatgirlBrittB @ohlaylala <<<< why in the world or what in the world is this lol 05 Oct 2009 from twidroid

RommiLuvsCheese JoannaRondo9 wow..who is your buddy @bmxbarry that's retweeting? Funny! 06 Oct 2009 from UberTwitter

-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

I don't think the DGRs should ever be misleading, that is, deny that they are not human, but they do need to be respectful (non pestering), courteous (responsive) and useful (informative & timely).

It's the response article which is tricky - the bots have no sense of meaning, yet, so a casual "you're welcome" or an 'emoticon' reply to any @ messaging, runs the risk of being inappropriate.

One approach to this would be that DGRs only ever ask questions, never answer them. This may sound counter productive, but at their conception, they are research agents not search agents.

What I mean is that they are not harvesting, but relating, to live information - producing messaging that produces identity of 'their' character. They are, perhaps, (Method) actor models.

Bearing in mind, that the DGRs need to exist without a predefined 'script'...

... improvisation is a must have feature.

Persona Flow

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:36:00 +0000

The DGR builds up a persona through small amounts of information - at present - by using Retweets. It's about maximizing a character's development through the generation of the smallest amount of addition - specifically - the 'RT' prefix.

Bit by bit they begin to create a character's possible motives, direction and purpose.

Our visiting artist, Marcus, has begun to join these bits by building out a blog within the character's persona. Using the Retweets as the material to inform blog posts, he begins to give the back story, the mythology, the meaning behind the Retweeting.

Marcus is doing what any reader of the character's Twitter feed is doing - filling in the gaps between the tweets - joining the dots - making sense of the facts, as a fiction. As Rob pointed out, the DGR is a tool for storytellers, using probability and online structured data.

To set up the character, Marcus used this cool mind mapping application, MindMeister to map out the emotion to action relationships we use in the character definition file. Here's an embedded version of the map, which you can explore. It's a live file, so you're likely to see Marcus' changes over time.

Further, Marcus wanted to make a video through the eyes of Felix, to develop the persona, with a view to updating the characters parameters. By using Google Maps (Street View), you get a sense of familiarity with a sense of unease: this is the uncanny valley of experience, like the eeriness of the avatars that needs to be fiercely wrestled with at some point.

Here's the video journey of Felix traveling around his place of work in Liverpool Street, London, Music by Airborne Sound.

Bearing in mind that we'd like to play with AR somewhere in the future, this video gives a glimpse of what the DGRs could produce by themselves.

Felix Freeman. Memory One. from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

These sketches are not so much extensions of the character, but tools to design the character further. The crossover between using these tools to tell a fiction and to design a fiction is where the DGRs get really interesting because the characters are almost unproduct. Their persona flows between design and production as easily as information passes from one web service to another, adding a little more value to the viewers experience every time it's gets passed through a web service with zero overhead costs to the core system.

I say almost, as they are not really generating any new raw information themselves - they're parasitical (but non-physical) spimes at the moment producing metadata. We're still learning / deciding how best to implement their own, self styled, messaging - and for what reason.

But for now, they do seem to be generating droplets of persona every time they Retweet - so they are adding something to something, just by producing simple ~~communications~~ broadcasts.

We are also learning from the bots themselves. But it's a long process, because the bots are live on Twitter and we have to be respectful to the people they Retweet and be careful not to speed up the DGRs Tweeting rate too high. Also the patterns of Retweets are complex to decipher for narrative coherency.

This is where Marcus' sketches come in so useful - it's a form of testing to see where we can maximize the depth of the character's communications whilst keeping the logic of the system to a minimum. Unlike Conway's Game of Life, the simple rules of the DGR are influenced by the streams of social conversation (Blog posts & Tweets), adding infinite variables to our simple rule sets. This should make the character's persona rich, flowing and open.

Marcus' choice of design tools helps explore this context of the character and DGR development because his use of live web tools follow the development rather than inform it. Design as documentation, you might say.

Probabilistic Narrative

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Myers) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:14:00 +0000

Rob, the lead engineer on The Demo Graphic Replicator, has gladly stepped forward to explain some more about the reasoning behind the design. It's a pleasure working with this kind of thinking. Over to Rob...

Stories have structure, and that structure can be represented and manipulated by computers. In the mid-19th Century Ada Lovelace only imagined generating musical compositions using programs, not stories. But as early as the 1960s programs were being written to use Vladimir Propp's system for representing existing Russian fairy stories from his book "Morphology Of The Folktale" to generate descriptions of new stories.

The Artificial Intelligence programming of the 20th Century relied for the most part, like Propp's notation for folktales, on discovering and encoding rules. Narrative generation systems followed this lead, and tended to produce series of events that lack story arcs, character development or other high-level features of stories. The state of the art by the end of the 1980s is described in the book Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory by Marie-Laure Ryan. At best the systems described produce Aesopian fables without the moral; narrative without narrative.

In the 21st century, the rise of Collective Intelligence means that statistical methods based on information gathered from the activity large numbers of people have replaced rule-based approaches derived from expert opinion for many tasks. This isn't a new development for artificial intelligence or for generative narrative, Markov chains and other statistical methods have long been used to generate the text of short stories. What is new is the availability of vast amounts of structured text on the Internet for those statistical methods to be used on.

DGRs are story characters represented as lists of words that represent their personality, interests and activities. Each time the DGR is run it chooses some of those words randomly to represent its current interior state. It searches Twitter for tweets containing any of those words. Then it retweets the first found tweet to express its own current situation in the story.

The tweets may contradict each other over time, but at a demographic level they will tend to match the character. A significant amount of the retweeted tweets will match the DGR's personality and situation, and incongruous retweets can help to shake up the story. The DGR is a probabilistic character in a probabilistic narrative.

The breakthough with DGRs is to recognise that although some retweets won't fit the character the average of the retweets will be "good enough". The reader can fill in the gaps and file off the rough edges, rendering the character imaginatively in their mind as they would with a scripted character in a story written with a pre-planned plot by a single human being. They give the storyteller a powerful new tool to work with, and they give the reader engaging new characters to imagine and follow.

Touching the Gurus

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:32:00 +0000

Well, it's taken about a week, but one of the Siblings has finally drifted under the nose of a Social Media Rock Star, in this case, Guy Kawasaki.

Guy, if you've wandered over to this blog - Hi! - leave us a comment - you're opinion is valued here. Maybe the siblings could have Alltop.com pages? Would be awesome if you provided an API.

Felix Freeman by Marcus Brown.

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:38:00 +0000

There's no better way to test a 'social media character design application' than with a master of social media character design.

After a long arduous selection process, we are extremely happy to announce that artist, Marcus Brown, has emerged as one of the specialists who is going to test drive the Demo Graphic Replicator.

Marcus needs very little introduction to you all, I'm sure. A passionate creative, with an overwhelming curiosity in all our uses of social media - especially Twitter. Here's a sampler of his insights and appropriation techniques of Re-reading Tweets to portray character, with @gapingvoid as the topic.

Official Tweet Reading VIII: Hugh MacLeod from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

Marcus' first Sibling creation is Felix Freeman. A London based, 20 something, working in the city.

I'm not going to publish Felix's source code here, just yet. All I can say is that the first tweets from Felix made Marcus and me go, "OoooOh, interesting."

Please show your appreciation for the art of Marcus and subscribe to Felix.

More characters from Marcus soon - I hope. Possibly a short video on how he approaches the design of a character too. That would be awesome, I'm sure you'll agree.

Thanks Marcus.

Update.
Read how Marcus is extending and designing the Sibling in other media.
Also, Felix on FriendFeed.

A little attention.

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:13:00 +0000

Both KrankyChloe and Ohlaylala have both received a little good will and attention from 2 esteemed bloggers in the 'demographic' industry.

John Griffiths, pushing for hyper-localization.

Kyle Studstill, welcoming normalization.

Both issues are on the agenda.

Meanwhile, verysexyseo, is drawing quite a following and receiving, what I would consider, a large amount of DMs. 25 per day. Quite a lot isn't it? Many of them are solutions to 'making more friends'. They just keep pouring in. All the time.

xibipiio

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:36:00 +0000

The Siblings have an interesting order of existence - technically they don't exist until they do something - such as post a message. For an audience (watching) the experience is either fleeting or persisting though imagination.

James Bridle told me about Daniel Everertt over brunch today - whilst discussing the DGRs. Everett spent a slab of time in with the Pirahã People of Brazil (The Hi'aiti'ihi) as a Christian Missionary - charged with slowly explaining Jesus & co to the tribes.

Map from spiegel.de Article on the adventures of Everett.

In short, they converted him to their way of seeing - which is based upon 3 simple rules.

1. Did you experience, what you are telling me, first hand?
2. Did you get the information from a friend?
3. Did you deduce this information?

As such, they hold the idea that experience is everything - to which bleeds into their habits. The name of Everett's account of the tribes, is "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes." is the functional, meaningful way of saying "Good night" - which is a hollow western gesture. Further, because of the snakes, the Pirahã People nap during the day and night, for 15 minutes to 2 hours. Ah, Tribe life.

There's loads of good assumptions debunked in Everett's writing - how language and state of being are not essentially routed in mythology.

Here he is talking at the Long Now Foundation. He explains the term xibipiio, which is about 'slipping in and out of experience', a kin to 'peek-a-boo' games children play. Fascinating stuff this for language rules and 'game play'.

And a BBC Radio 4 reading from Everett. All good stuff. Plenty to borrow and learn from for the Siblings 'development'. The lack of a creation myth and fictionals in their culture forces them to exist only in the present. I like this as an approach to the DGR Siblings existence - they don't need faith - they only need existence.

In terms of 'arts', Wikipedia notes:

They have very little artwork. The artwork that is present, mostly necklaces and drawn stick-figures, is used primarily to ward off evil spirits.

If the Siblings are to have creativity, then I have to ask what would be the evil spirits within their digital dimension?

Further reading to be had everywhere on the web, but this Times article is a good overview.

Here's the Amazon link for the book - "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes."

Thanks James!

Picturing Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Zeroinfluencer) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:23:00 +0000

So as the Siblings RTweet away, it's nice to wonder what images would be on their mind.

Using a classique Twitter & Flickr mashup via Keyword Extraction using Yahoo!Pipes, you get a slideshow based upon their Retweets.

Here's Jimmmo's 'mind' or 'memory'. Whatever you want to perceive it as.

In contrast, here's Very Sexy Seo.

First one to a Unicorn wins a prize.

This is just a sketch - very little logic used - just the RTweets being 'content analysed' under Bayesian tracking functions. (Finds the rarest word in the tweets, uses it for a tag to look up the image).

It's an easy (dirty) psychological trick to present an array of images as a form of narrative - the mind adapts itself to seeing a pattern regardless of how fuzzy it is.

The filtering from the characters file is informing the RTweets, and the loss of original context and thus original intended meaning does not carries over intact - leaving it open to interpretation - perfect for loosely coupling of images - as they too are devoid of their original intended meaning.

The new context provided by the Sibling demonstrates that it's the interaction with media objects that projects personality, not the definition of the character upfront.

As retrieval devices, perhaps they should evolve to be more 'refined' - which will involve a data storage. At this point, they remain more open to development oppotunities by insisting they exist in fleeting data storage (an archive in a twitter or FriendFeed stream).

Larger, permanent archives would give more data to process, giving a more refined feedback on how the character would/could/should develop. BUT, this would involve a sense of 'learning' and I'm not sure that is a wise path to follow. How, and by whom, should their mythology be maintained? Will their actions bear consequences? Will this provide destiny?

On a more important note, I don't think there is any 'family filter' on the slideshow. With respect to Flickr's TOS, I expect to see a little smut on the Siblings minds. Keep popping back to take a peek.

(Yes, this did turn up in a siblings feed.)

The Yahoo!Pipe used for the slide show is here.

Update - 10 minutes later...
I've added the Yahoo!Pipes output for VerySexySeo to its FriendFeed Account, with Friendfeed set to post any new images to Twitter. When the Sibling ReTweets, it forces Yahoo!Pipes to update, forcing FriendFeed to update (in real time) and post to Twitter. So, you should see links to Flickr images after a Retweet has been published, thus seeing the visual response from the sibling shortly after the Retweeting. The lag time should just be enough to make it feel human-ish.

Here's a FriendFeed Search for the images collected. They are posting to Twitter with URL pointing directly to Flickr.

The gray area is that users ReTweets are being 'transformed' without permission - but that's the semantic web for ya. Saying that, the ReTweet is published prior to the transformation, so attribution is paid up. I think we're on safe grounds with this.

Of course, this whole process can be applied to Youtube, Delicious, Technorati etc etc...2.0.

Which will be noisy, but helps blend the bots into the background (less spamesque) and harder to machine-detect against human managed account. But, they are on the edge of being global-micro-publishers.