Who is Newsbot?

I just noticed that there is a member with the name newsbot posting so many news information but he is not taking part in any other section hah: Just curious Who is he??

 

lol, i think 'newsbot' really is a news bot (aka a program which does nothing but post news)

 

heh...thats right. It's just a script which seems to fetch tech news from the bbc website via RSS.

 

ohkie...Its a very kewl idea!

 

Yeah, thats what i was thinking, to be honest, i don't really like it, it just has like on expert, and then a link.... When people post news, they give some input, and a paragraph of good info, plus a link, IMO way sweeter, but oh well i guess.

 

The newsbot is all of us and... the newsbot is none of us...

 

Thats exactly the type of answer i was looking for...so newsbot is a person but not a person whereas newsbot is one of us but not one of us...also newsbot is all of us but he/she is none. Fantastic!!

[ot]lol..jking[/ot]

 

Actually, from what Sniper told us, it's a demon that will suck your soul if you tick him off.





Kidding (duh)
It's a way for the staff to post news without logging onto HWF.

 

That's pretty sweet, did Sniper develop it himself? HWF API's?

 

I must not be paying attention, swap around the words 'suck' and 'tick' then you'll get what I saw at first glance.

 

But...why use a newsbot feed/script at all?

I know several forums use them...but...why? To increase forum activity for SE's? To give the appearance of activity for visitors?

If it's just to get headline news why not just string a BBC feed in a sidebar, instead of making it appear as a post?

And why use the type that is not much more than a link...one line and a link? I've seen some news bots that actually look like posts...newsbots that post a snippet of about 5-6 lines long about the story then the link.

Just curious as to your reasoning for using them and why that kind of bot.

 

i think the answer is why not, i have the BBS RSS feed on my bookmarks bar but i can never be arsed clicking it... but i find myself reading the stories the newsbot puts up.

Could we add more feeds to it? like slashdot, Digg (The Microsoft & Linux sections under tech) etc

 

Well...there must be a reason...I see several sites using them...I'd just like to know why.

Feeds are generally put on websites to give visitors some extra content to look at...but because they're usually javascript they're basically worthless as content for search engines...

ClickZ: Search Engines and JavaScript
ClickZ: Search Engines and JavaScript

as for ' forum application of news feeds '...that's maybe a different ball of wax.