Guardian Robot wants some love. The electronics for the bot totaled just over $97.
(Credit: guardian.co.uk)A tiny robot made of cardboard and $100 of electronics can monitor your Twitter feed and help spread good karma.
Developer Ken Lim's Guardian Robot is gloriously low-tech, with only two servos and a basic control board. Its body was fashioned out of an old Wii Sports Resort box.
But it saves on Twitter reading time.
Profiled on a blog sponsored by the Guardian newspaper, the little guy watches Twitter feeds for keywords indicating happy or sad posts. It reacts to happy tweets by raising its arm in triumph, and to sad ones by lowering its head despondently like Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Guardian Robot remains in either state until it gets a "high five" when a switch on its hand is pressed, or a "hug" through a switch on its belly.
It also sends out appropriate replies though its Twitter account.
Lim is encouraging others to build their own robot slaves by posting the code for the bot. He finds his creation comforting: "I simply have to glance at the robot to get a status update, or simple ignore it when I have to. He has become as reassuring as a wall clock."
Ken Lim's Guardian Robot from InsideGuardian on Vimeo.
(Via Open Platform)
Google's robots.txt file wards off brains-devouring zombies.
(Credit: CNET News)Google, whose servers constantly crawl the Web, doesn't have anything against spiders. But zombies, well, that's another matter.
Showing some timely techie humor, the search giant updated its robots.txt file for Halloween. For the uninitiated, search engines trying to index Web sites look for robots.txt files for instructions about whether they're permitted access to particular pages.
The Google robots.txt file on Friday begins with the following exclusion:
User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains
Most of the time when people do this sort of thing it's called an Easter egg. Is there such a thing as a Halloween egg?
(Via Matt Cutts.)
(Credit:
Google)
Any jokes about Google becoming a self-aware, humanity-destroying robot got a little closer to fruition yesterday. Google Talk (download the desktop widget), Google's homemade Jabber-based chat client, is now host to 24 (and counting) new translation bots that will take whatever text you throw at it and convert it to the appropriate language. Each of the bots was built with an open protocol called XMPP that lets anyone build their own bots and share them on the Google Talk network--as long as you've got some place to host them.
The new bots become particularly useful if you invite one into a group chat with one or more users who speak a different language. The bot will automatically translate the conversation so each user can understand one another, which you can see on the screenshot to the left.
The translation bot project was the result of some of the Google Talk team's 20 percent rule, Google's somewhat infamous option of having software engineers spend one day a week working on side projects. Besides bots, some of the other services that have come out of 20 percent time have been AdSense, Orkut, keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader, and Google News.
[Via Google Talkabout]
Ignite finished strong with presentations from Justin.tv, RobotReplay, and Omnidrive.
Justin Kan of Justin.tv talked about how easy it is to promote your site or product with the right strategy. It also doesn't hurt to have a camera hooked to a laptop, with an EV-DO connection streaming every second of your life. Our previous Justin.tv coverage here and here. Surreal moment of the talk? Checking Justin.tv and seeing him talking to us. Creepy
Andre Charland discussed the difficulty of launching his new site RobotReplay, which lets Web site owners keep track of where their visitors are going, and what they're looking at for free. Related: Atten.tv, which we checked out last week.
Nik Cubrilovic of Omnidrive talked to the crowd about its new proposed protocol called WebFS, which the company wants to be a standard interface for transferring files around the Web. In laymen terms, it means you've got one central storage point for all your files stored online, and that storage is used by multiple services. Interesting.
That's it for Ignite. The rest of the Web 2.0 Expo kicks off tomorrow, so be sure to check back for continued coverage. And don't forget, if you're in San Francisco, it's not too late to grab your free exhibition pass.
A slide from Justin.tv's presentation about how to get free publicity. For the record, we're hefeweizen fans
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