in Cheap Thoughts

Cheap Thoughts: Self-Writing Blog

What if I could invent a blog that wrote itself? A blog that took the difficulty of coming up with topics completely out of the picture?

For instance, what if I added some software to an iPod or Treo that made it narrate everything it sees? Kind of like Closed Captioning but for real life?

Man, if this was a product I would buy one.

  1. The new tribot has a module that absorbs all the stuff on the irc channel and can use it to create new sentences using markov chains (iirc). You could try something like that, perhaps. A spider that would go out on the net, read as many blogs as possible and then write entries on its own based on that.

    Hmm… that actually sounds like an intersting research project. 🙂

  2. Some guys (from MIT?) wrote a program to generate a “research paper” that was entirely random, made-up and bogus. And it got accepted for submission to some conference or other… I don’t remember all the details, search the /. archives if you’re interested.

    So yeah, if that can be done, it should be pretty doable to make a self-writing blog. And to make it even more interesting, maybe you could let readers rank the entries on how good they are, and use some genetic algorithms (or other machine learning approach) to allow the system to adapt to feedback and improve over time.

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