Blog bot

Here are some quotes from a gaming blog:

Major Nelson's Xbox - 05/15/06
You would think I had died and gone to heaven when Major Nelson showed up to play. Gamer score stands at 3437. That is a gain of 15 points over last time! He played Battlefield 2: MC, and wished it would never end, but it did and that was sad.

Major Nelson's Xbox - 05/14/06
I saw Major Nelson walk by yesterday morning... I was hoping he would come play and he did. 3422 points and climbing. That is a gain of 30 points over last time! He played UNO gaining 2 achievements, and after that powered me down without even saying good night. I mean what the hell?

Major Nelson's Xbox - 05/13/06
Hmmm... Major Nelson was nowhere to be seen yesterday... maybe he is at E3. If he is, he better bring back some awesome swag, like some hot new exclusive demos.

The strange thing about this blog that it isn't written by Major Nelson, it is written by Major Nelson's Xbox 360. If you have a XBox 360 on the internet, you can sign up at 360Voice with your XBox Live Gamertag. Your XBox already collects all the information about how long you play, what you play, and what your score is. 360Voice takes that information in XML format and transforms it into a blog, written from the point of view of your XBox. A blog bot, so to say.

Depending on your point of view that is either the future of blogging, or silly, and slightly menacing. There is a lot of information collected on you by your XBox, and sent to some Microsoft server. Whether you want to blog it is your choice, but even if you don't, some people have access to those data, and will study them for marketing purposes. Knowing exactly what games your customers are playing, and for how long is pretty powerful, much more powerful than the Nielsen Rating for TV, which just works on a small "representative" sample. And just like the Nielsen Rating today can make or break a TV show, the data collected by the XBox 360 will be used to determine what games will be made in the future, and even how these games will be priced.

From a "future of blogging" point of view, I'm less concerned. I don't see me replaced by a blot bot anytime soon. Of course it would be totally possible for Blizzard to collect that sort of data in World of Warcraft, how long you play, what quests you do, what dungeons you visit, and when you level up, and offer that to you in XML, for use in an automated blog. But compared to me writing about what I did in WoW last weekend, such an automated blog would be lacking the opinions, and rants, that make a blog worth reading.