Replacing Sports Bloggers With an Algorithm 120
tesmar tips a report up at TechCrunch that begins "Here come the robo sports journalists. While people in the media biz worry about content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content spitting out endless SEO-targeted articles written by low-paid Internet writers, at least those articles are still written by humans. We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories. A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet, today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball team in the US. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes. Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet's content algorithms. 'The posts are completely auto-generated,' says founder Robbie Allen. 'The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts.'"
Re:Close, but still not pratical (Score:3, Informative)
The raw numbers are useful, but many people would like to read a quick summary of the highlights of the statistics, rather than having to read through them themselves.
Somebody who is not well acquainted with the specific stats may have trouble telling what is unusual, or combining them together to reach a conclusion. Even those familiar with the statistics would often find it quicker to read the computer generated summary than trying to skim the numbers to determine if they are worth spend more time on.
But I would agree that providing the actual numbers is important, so the summaries can be verified if desired, etc.