As group work starts in earnest, I have relinquished sole ownership of the bot and the team and I will meet on Sunday to come up with some strategies together for future bot activity. To teamwork!
In our last lecture we started on some nltk which I have come into to contact with before and is an excellent module with a fantastic book that is freely available online in its entirety (I love computer science). The aim of the lecture was to use some nltk tricks to get our bot chatting. I had been doing this already by retweeting some bieber tweets (beits? biebeets?) but now we’re going to be stealing some tweets from the twitterverse and rebranding them as our own also which will be fun. We’re going to do some simple sentiment analysis to make sure we are not saying anything really horrible. For now, it will be relatively simple, something with a sentiment keyword list like this. yoink.
We are not in the top 7 list by follower count (although I am personally and we may bot my account just to get moving on this end of things too) but we’re doing alright. High scoring members of the class presented how they had gotten so many followers and the lead team in fact seemed to have done everything manually and with tools they got online. There are no rules for the followers competition but that smells like cheating to me. Their strategy has been to post photos of bieber and it is going well.
So until next time:
The numbers
diary of a social bot 