i’ve created my first twitter bot called tweadABook. the bot tweets a book (pdf) in 140(ish) character chunks once per hour. it won’t tweet a word mid-word, but it will not respect sentences, though it will respect new chapters and wait for a new tweet to begin the chapter.

tweadABook is currently going through The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. I figure I should use my powers for good to start and not tweet out books with active copyrights, though this project has got me thinking a bit about when does a quote, or group of concurrent quotes, become more than just a quote(s) and actually infringe on copyright? also, does it matter how spaced out these quotes are in terms of posting, or what if the order is slightly altered? it wouldn’t be hard to write another bot to capture my tweets and recreate the original text.

hopefully i’ll have time this week to put together a much more detailed writeup on the bot and how it works on my other blog, rehr.

the new tumblr interface makes me not want to visit this site anymore.