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BotSpot® Bi-Weekly Newsletter February 28, 2001 Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain... I recently saw the A&E show here in the U.S. that ranked the top 100 most important people in the millennium. Guess who was number 1? Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type printing press. Gutenberg gets the number one spot because his invention paved the way for the start of the Information Age. No longer would information remain amongst a select few. Anyone with the means could start mass-producing printed material. I wonder, then, if the people of the future will give such praise to Tim Berners-Lee, whose concept of the World Wide Web goes far beyond printed material. Now, anyone can produce information that can be read anywhere in the world. Even someone like me. Well, maybe the Web isn't such a great thing after all. Regardless, I'm a few months into this caretakership of BotSpot, and I though this would be an appropriate forum to give people the lay of the land, so to speak, and answer some of those frequently asked questions that cross my electronic mailbox. Hopefully your question is in this list. What is a bot? Trust me, this is the number one question I get. To answer it, I am going to fall back on the definitions provided by bot expert David Pallmann. To Pallmann, a bot the equivalent to an automated program, or "any software that doesn't require constant human intervention." In contrast, Pallmann's definition of an agent is a bot that serves a specific body, whether it be a person, department, or organization. Agents, he says, are aware of the the needs and wishes of their masters and are skilled in specialized areas. Intelligent agents, Pallmann defines, as simply agents that are worth having. By being able to automate tasks with a minimum of human intervention, intelligent agents are very distinguishable from traditional software that does require more human interaction. Who decides what bots get listed? That would be me. Contrary to popular belief, there is no smartly humming staff behind the scenes here at BotSpot. There is just me. The criteria for getting listed on BotSpot is very simple: the application has to be a some form of bot, agent, or intelligent, based on the definitions mentioned above. I told you about my bot two weeks ago, and it still isn't listed! What's the deal? In order to be fair, I try to post bots in the order that I hear about them. I can usually only test bots and write a pithy review about them about twice a week. Right now I have a backlog of 24 applications that deserve a listing on BotSpot. If I can't catch up with them soon, I may start posting the bot first and then coming back to do the review later. I need a bot that will do this, this, and that. Join the club. People have mistaken BotSpot as a repository of sorts for all bots in the world. While my ultimate goal is to provide pointers to as many bots as I can, BotSpot does not have these files on hand for distribution. I need a game bot for (Insert game here) or I want a copy of this bot somebody's running on my IRC channel. These two queries are a tie. My initial response is the same as the previous question, but with an additional caveat. Many times developers of bots, especially for IRC channels or games, don't want their bots to be used by anyone else--or even that they officially exist, since some online games may frown on bot participation. So, if you can't find a bot on the Web, and the developer in question is keeping mum on the topic, then likely there will be little I can do to track down the bot. What's your sign? Scorpio--whoops! Wrong set of questions! Let's move on, shall we? News Stories Marvin Mabel InfoScanner ASPseek Bot
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