Commentary

Real Media Riffs - Monday, Mar 26, 2007

WHY THE FUTURE DOESN'T NEED THE RIFF -- Never mind the fact that the past didn't have much use for us either; our long national nightmare is finally over. We've found a way to generate "Real Media Riffs" on a regular and sustainable basis. It's called Riffbot, and MediaPost's software development team is just completing the final coding of the program right now. It's based on a pseudo artificial intelligence protocol. We came up with a pseudo one to replicate the intelligence of the original Riff.

The program has been years in the making and promises to revolutionize the craft of media industry punditry by removing the pundit from the process altogether and focusing on a shorter, more concise form of exposition based entirely on puns.

Because the resulting prose will be virtually unreadable by most humans, MediaPost technicians are working on a complementary program dubbed Readerbot. The goal is to have Readerbots interacting with Riffbot seamlessly and continuously, alleviating humans from tedious tasks like thinking, getting pissed off, posting irate comments to the Riffbot blog and/or checking the "opt out" box at the bottom of the "Real Media Riffs" column. Readerbot does it all for them.

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Even more ingeniously, Readerbot has a self-replicating program that continuously generates new subscribers to "Real Media Riffs," thus satisfying MediaPost's need to expand the readership base for our advertisers.

"We're almost finished," says MediaPost's Chief Technical Officer Mark Kecko, "but there's one glitch that we can't seem to debug. The program inexplicably converts all our advertising rates into Linden dollars that are only redeemable in Second Life."

Otherwise, Kecko says the program is so good that it has virtually perfected the exact style of the original Riff columns in a way that would be imperceptible to all but the most discerning Readerbots.

"The most difficult part was writing code that would ensure the same number of typos, grammatical flaws, clichés and plagiarism as the original 'Real Media Riffs' columns. The program kept fixing all those mistakes, but then we came up with a solution: fuzzy logic."

Kecko says a beta version of the Riffbot and Readerbot programs will be available for download soon. In the meantime, you can read the inspiration behind the whole thing by clicking here.

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