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BotSpot® Bi-Weekly Newsletter What's Love Got to Do With It? If you are not reading this in the United States, or any other country that celebrates it, you may not be aware that today is Valentine's Day, a holiday that celebrates the joy and happiness that surrounds the emotion called love. Today is a day that is sure to send a young man's heart aflutter, either in anticipation of seeing his loved one, or in squeezing panic when he realizes he forgot to buy his loved one a card. When I looked at the members of the panel discussion at the end of BOT2001, I was certainly struck by one thing: here are a bunch of people who certainly love what they are doing. Love comes in many different forms, not just what happens between consenting adults. Love can be an outgrowth of dedication and perseverance. While we don't truly love the object that we try to create, we can certainly love the process of creation. Programmers of any stripe will certainly understand what I am talking about. Non-programmers can relate as well: whenever you create something with your bare hands and brains, there is a certain sense of pride and affection you have for that creation. So it was with this panel of distinguished experts that faced the audience. Some were allies, some were friends, and some were competitors. All, however, were there for the love of bot technology and the promises they all know it will deliver. Which made it all that much easier to ask my one question for the panel. It was not exactly my question, but one that has been asked by nearly 50 people in the brief time I have been working on BotSpot. It's a very elementary question, but one that these experts certainly had the answers for. The question was this: What are the best resources for programmers who are interested in bot development to turn to? Collectively, the panel blinked, took a deep breath, and rattled out some answers for me. Dr. Karl von Wendt, CEO, of KiwiLogic.com, glibly pointed out that programmers new to bots should visit his company's Web site, which drew chuckles from the rest of the panel. But, the Lingubot product line his company has created does offer some interesting tools to start putting bot technology to use. Another powerful tool, the panelists pointed out, was David Pallmann's Network Query Language. Pallmann, the Chief Technologist at NQL, Inc., is also the author of the seminal book Programming Bots, Spiders, & Intelligent Agents in MS Visual C++ (MS Press, 1999), which several panelists agreed was the best written work for a programmer to get started with. Beyond this collection of tools, however, the panelists seemed reluctant to point out one "magic pill" to achieve bot development expertise. To them, there was no one way of going about it. Marcus Zillman, the creator and founder of BotSpot.com, felt that the answer really relies on a more general approach. He suggested that programmers wanting to learn about bots visit any open source bot development project they could find. Zillman specifically suggested visiting SourceForge, an open source development coordination Web site. "That will give them a general understanding," Zillman stated. He also encouraged new bot developers to join any listservs they could find about bots and bot development. Dr. David Croson, a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, echoed this more general approach, though from a different direction. Croson recommends that programmers study process analysis techniques, independent of any one programming language. By developing the ability to properly analyze the process flow of a desired bot's job, the new bot developer will be able to more easily understand how to build that bot. The panelist's main conclusion? Keep your ears open, then start joining in the discussions, and finally start working on your own. It's a simple path to joining the world of bot development. News Stories Freethinking
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