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March 21, 2014, 11:50 a.m.
LINK: twitter.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Caroline O'Donovan   |   March 21, 2014

Found yourself sitting at your desk this week, furtively checking the score to see if anything exciting is happening? Toggle no more: Two members of the WNYC Data News Team have a bot for that.

The New York Times has shown with their currently-on-hiatus 4th Down Bot that sports and automated reporting on social media go hand in hand. With March Madness in full swing, the time is ripe for another stab at the sports bot.

Veltman is a former Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow who recently joined Jenny Ye at WNYC.

The toy was an instant hit, and suggests there’s room for a lot more innovating in the sports bot space.

Veltman says he was “initially was scraping the scoreboard directly,” but realized he could get more accurate, timely data from “the JSONP file that powers the scoreboard on NCAA.com.” The developers in the audience should look for a Source post explaining the nitty-gritty next week.

And, in other news:

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