Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Trump wants news outlets to get on board with “Gulf of America” — or else. Will they?
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
March 3, 2014, 12:38 p.m.
LINK: docs.google.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Caroline O'Donovan   |   March 3, 2014

I am newly returned from Baltimore and the NICAR conference, where one of the most laugh-out-loud sessions of the weekend involved Brian Abelson, Joe Kokenge and Abraham Epton talking about how and why to build Twitter bots. Stephen Suen, of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies writing program, has a helpful blog post about the conversation.

Kokenge laid out the basics of making a bot. Epton talked about his ILCampaignCash, a Chicago Tribune product that tracks and tweets campaign donations. Abelson offered a long list of bots both humorous (like @FloridaMan or @Haikugrams) and practical (like @TreasuryIO or @YourRepsOnGuns) that suggested the breadth of possibility when it comes to bots. There are also, of course, challenges:

Brian says the logic behind the Twitter bot is strict rather than greedy. He also points to issues faced with Times Haiku. “The challenge is, how are we not going to make a haiku of the Syrian civil war, how are we not going to make a haiku of something that’s serious… that’s why it’s easier to do some of these funny artistic ones rather than something you can put the name of a newsroom on.”

Once again, rate limiting is brought up — Abraham says you can write the logic of your bot to avoid having your account get deleted. “Use common sense,” he says. The more you avoid behaviors that make your bot seem like a spam bot, the safer your account will be. Joe and Brian agree — the rate limit is high enough that you can get away with a tweet every 5 minutes without hitting it.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Trump wants news outlets to get on board with “Gulf of America” — or else. Will they?
The White House’s move to block AP’s reporters over its house style has turned a debate about language into one about power.
If you ask New York Times reporters to spend less time on Twitter, will they? (Spoiler: yes)
An analysis of more than 185,000 tweets by New York Times staffers showed they got less opinionated — and less frequent overall — when a management memo asked the newsroom to scale back the takes.
“Lightning in a bottle”: Meredith Clark on Black Twitter’s journalistic impact, legacy — and writing its “obituary”
“No matter what the technology is, we’re going to be using it.”