At the ASIS IA Summit, Celia, Victor and myself talked a lot about the potential of bots. I’ve been trying to put stuff together on them and talking with Matt Webb about them for a while now.

Victor asked today what an IAbot would do. I replied that it would be amazingly easy to code as its response to every query would be “It depends…”. Celia asked her favourite bot, Dipsy, about Information Architecture…

ia?
dipsy: ia is Information Architecture
Information architecture?
dipsy: wish i knew, space
Information Architect?
dipsy: i don’t know, space
tell me about security
dipsy: security is really interesting. libpcap, raw sockets… yummy.
usability?
dipsy: bugger all, i dunno, space
explain karma users
dipsy: Positive: “into face sucks” … Negative: “punks and
weirdos”,”interface sucks”,”just complain” … Overall: -9
explain karma designers
dipsy: Negative: “worse then nathans”,”how am i supposed to get this
7mb presentation onto a machien with a FDD?” … Overall: -7
design?
dipsy: design is really crap
content?
dipsy: rumour has it content is easily pirated
the internet?
dipsy: rumour has it the internet is entirely iffy
the web?
dipsy: the web is bad and wrong, and should be culled
bots?
dipsy: somebody said bots was a list at
http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/bots or for talking about bots,
including (but not limited to) infobots
explain karma bots
dipsy: Positive: “I like me” … Overall: 4
explain karma dipsy
dipsy: Positive: “knows the entire “”meaning of liff”””,”keeping our
‘secrets'”,”knows me like i know myself” … Negative: “Arcane quoting
rules”,”fick”,”shouldn’t have remembered that” … Overall: 273
bbc?
dipsy: bbc is, like, a funny place to work
matt jones?
dipsy: matt jones is a Good Bloke.
follow me
dipsy: sorry…
follow me
dipsy: what?
follow me
dipsy: i’m not following you…