“Randy robots rape rhinoceros.” Too racy?
Our forebears were hunters and gatherers. Newsgathering in the digital age devolved into a lot of gathering, and very little hunting. Each day, underpaid scribes gather ‘round their monitors in search of news items. Add a snarky comment, or simply steal the thing, forget where you found it, and another story is not necessarily good, but at least good to go. Content, allegedly king, is being produced under conditions that would cause mass suicides in Chinese sweatshops. A good deal of the news stories at the Daily Kanban are written under more humane conditions – they are written by a bot. Meet Rob Otter. Here is his story.
Verticalscope, the Canadian outfit where Dailykaban co-conspirators Ed Niedermeyer and Bertel Schmitt worked for a while, says its “AutoGuide.com Group, comprised of over 300 automotive websites, attracts the largest group of automotive shoppers, owners and influencers in the online industry.” Whether the latter is true is debatable. One thing is for certain: Editing 300 automotive websites does not scale well, especially when all 300 individually sift through the same news sources.
