What follows are two works by two artists employing weblogs and automated bots.

Blogbot by Alex Dragulescu (image above) is a bot which generates an experimental novel by harvesting text from weblogs based around a specified theme:

What I Did Last Summer is the first experimental graphic novel generated by blogbot, using cached versions of My War (written by a U.S. soldier deployed in Iraq) and the now famous Baghdad Blogger. The protagonists of What I Did Last Summer are military and civilian units from the game Civilization 3.

Blog Bot Platform (image above) by Andy Broomfield unlike Blogbot doesn’t use blogs to generate work it enables objects to connect and potentially communicate:

Blog Bot Platform is a system, created with a Java program, that allows hobbyists to connect simple sensors to objects and give these objects ‘voices’ we can ‘hear’ via web 2.0 services, such as ‘Twitter’. Hobbyists can attach the different sensors to objects they have an interest in, and allow them to broadcast messages through text micro-blogs. These stream of text messages are then encountered in the public timeline, enabling the objects to express themselves amongst the streams of other tweets.

Almost a direct, albeit simplified, implementation of Bruce Sterlings Spimes as described in Shaping Things, Blog Bot Platform is an interesting invesigation into the internet of things. Although now finished Light Blogger Bots twitter page can be seen here, Storm Blogger Bots twitter page can be seen here and Explorer Blogger Bot can be seen here. Source code for Blog Bot Platform can be downloaded from Google Code here.