I was a bit unsure at first, I didn’t wanna lose botjunkie as I read it every morning when I wake up but it looks like the only changes will be even more robonews :)

Do you have any pull over there? Can you get them to provide more complete content in their RSS feed?

Currently, they barely provide a single sentence, which makes it pretty hard to know whether the post is worth checking out. For me personally, will probably reduce my readership.

@Checksumfail

We don’t want to lose you either! If you’re willing to come over to Automaton with us, I think you’ll be happy with what we’ll be doing.

@le_sacre

I have a little bit of pull ;) But yes, at the very least we’re going to try and include a pic (and possibly extra text) in the feed so you have a better idea of what the article is talking about.

I second le_sacre, though perhaps more vehemently. I don’t click through to read articles unless they really really get my attention on my RSS page. And article link-throughs do not. But I think what you mentioned will probably be sufficient. (Pics are important haha)

Thanks for the good solo run and I look forward to the future :)

Hello.
I’m quite new to BotJunkie, I love your site. My worry with IEEE Spectrum is that navigation from a phone is horrible. Each I try to open an article in a new page, or go straight to an article from my RSS app, I get redirected to their mobile home page, which is totally useless.
Otherwise, I think that it’s a great blog, that lacked regularity in content. I guess with BojJunkie it’s going to change to the better.

Evan – way to go my friend. Excellent opportunity to extend the discussion on robotics into the future.

Congratulations on your recent success! I’ve followed your site on and off for years now. I for one can appreciate the work and tenacity required to keep a blog fresh and “sticky.” Kudos!

Congrats! You can Erico will be an awesome team.

Thanks everyone! We hear what you’re saying about the RSS feed for sure, and I’ll see what I can find out about the mobile site too.

Congrats on the merger/promotion! I know just enough about IEEE to say this is a cool step up for you!

wow, even better ?

Well done Evan. I really hope your method of posting doesn’t change as you move over to IEEE. I work in a robotics research lab but get most of my up-to-date robot information from Botjunkie. Mainly because its so much easier to digest than some of the `official’ newsletters, blogs and academic papers. If anything, BotJunkie has often been a starting point for further reading. So keep up the good work and please don’t turn into Science Daily (Zzzz…)!

Congrats on the good news. I am a long time follower checking on your site every morning at work (except sundays since i know you do not usually update on sundays). IEEE automation is one of the other websites i check on a weekly basis because their articles are not as unique. I liked your site because one could not find most of your contents anywhere else. keep up the good work and plz give me a link to a daily newsletter.

Congrats Evan! Botjunkie is one of three websites I keep up with on a regular basis. IEEE is one of the others. I’m glad you’re moving to a good organization and I look forward to seeing your stuff over there. Good luck on new adventures!

Baker

congrats on your blog, your earned it :) ! I hope someday my robotics blog will be big like yours. you guys rock¡

On behalf of all of us at LetsMakeRobots, congratulations Evan. Looking forward to seeing what your newly found travel budget brings us!

+1 for having Automaton redirect to the mobile Automaton site when loaded in a mobile browser (rather than the mobile root site)

Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn all academic… That would be dull and stuffy and boring! ;)

Oh, and I asked about the mobile site: the errant redirect is a known bug that’s being worked on. Hang tight, it’s getting fixed.

I for one prefer the botjunkie site. ieee’s website is too busy and full of ads and other useless junk. This site is very clean and loads quickly. Also, is there a way to filter posts by author? No offense to the other posters on that blog, but if I wanted to read their posts, I would go visit their blogs. Sorry if this sounds harsh, I guess I’m just picky about the websites I visit. But I know you and lots of other people are happy with the switch, so good luck on your new blog. I wish you the best.

I couldn’t agree more with Michael W comments I probably wont be reading botjunkie articles anymore. IEEE site is way to full of junk and the article part is almost the smallest thing on the entire site + the address isn’t as beautiful as just simply botjunkie.com

thanks for a good run and good luck with your new site

I want to agree on the RSS front – I have very much enjoyed reading BotJunkie’s articles straight from my reader. I love the content, but I don’t see myself clicking through just to get to the articles.

I hear what you guys are saying about IEEE’s layout, but ads are just one of those things that come along with free content on the internet. That said, the layout is something that we’re looking at tweaking in the near future to try to clean it up a bit.

This is all good feedback, and we want to keep every last one of you as readers, so we’re taking what you’re saying seriously, I promise!

Good going Evan!

Congrats Evan. The IEEE blog seems to have some nice articles, so I look forward your collaboration with them.

But I have to second the RSS things, I mostly read BotJunkies from my reader and open the site when I want to share the article, look at the comments or re-read older articles so the IEEE RSS showing only the title is a tad annoying.

The redirect is going to happen pretty soon here, so now’s a good time to head over to Automaton to keep reading robot articles. We’re going to work on fixing the things about the site that you guys have pointed out, and I just hope you’ll be willing to stick around long enough for us to get those changes up and running.

Don’t forget, you can still get to the BotJunkie archive at this link: http://www.botjunkie.com/page/1/

Also, you can always email me (tips, feedback, money, whatever) at evan (at) botjunkie (dot) com.

And lastly, I’ve got a bunch of quality stuff waiting to be posted over on Automaton, but I’m going to be on vacation for a few weeks. It’s been very tough to do that while having to post every weekday on BotJunkie, so I figure I’ve deserved it. I’ll have posts on good stuff every day, and Erico will keep you up to date on any new happenings.

Thanks again, see you on the new blog! :D

I haven’t looked at IEEE much before, as BotJunkie has been my main source of information, and I for one would like to say thank you so much Evan for the awesome website and all the effort so far. I will be following you to IEEE simply on your recommendation, as I have greatly enjoyed each of your articles.

Congrats on the merger, but I’m very sorry to see BotJunkie go. What will happen to the old BotJunkie news stories?. Will we still be able to search them? (They are very useful for reference). :(

As for ieee.org I will read it, but sadly I won’t be able to join it to ever comment on ieee with its current login options. I would like to be able to contribute posts (as I was happy to do many times with botjunkie) and also I noticed ieee hasn’t got many commenters on it. Which is hardly surprising (especially for people in AI), when the only way to comment on ieee is to currently sign up to the most pervasive Orwellian companies, who want to profile and spy increasingly on what everyone thinks. (The problem isn’t now, its the future, for a start, the Internet is a growing database of peoples views). A lot of technical people I work with have nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter. As for Google, not a chance in hell. MyYahoo is effectively Microsoft and OpenID is a merger of all of them.

I don’t mind using a direct login into ieee, but I can never comment openly when forced to login to these Orwellian companies and I will avoid signing up to them. The biggest danger we have in the future with true AI (i.e. AGI) is the Orwellian control freaks endless aspirations for ever more power over people. Many of the people in power demonstrate strong and very clear warning signs of having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) (which is also demonstrated by their kinds actions throughout history) and such a Personality Disorder leads them to endlessly seek more power over others and they will lie, deceive & undermine in any way they can to get power. They have very little empathy for others and they will abuse future far better AI for way more power and people in AI will have no choice but to oppose them and the people in power will not like that (and the people in power do have ways to punish any opposition, as Nixon’s List shows).

Within the next 15-20 years confrontation and conflict is inevitable in the field of AI. Narcissists lack of empathy for others will mean they will not care how much harm their actions cause others in society, no matter how much power they get over society. The people in power will move to find ways to identify and even to automate ways to punish opponents, to in the end, hold back anyone who seeks to tell them they are wrong. Nixon’s Enemies List is a very good example of this kind of undermining behaviour. i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon's_Enemies_List

The most Orwellian companies are very much part of this growing future problem (money working with power) and future AI will play a central role in it. (Most people are unaware of the Machiavellian extent of cunning and duplicity of Narcissists. They will need to be opposed at some point, because they will never stop in their two faced push towards an Orwellian world, very much for their benefit, at the expense of everyone else).

As I say, the problem isn’t now, its 10, 15, 20 years from now, when the Internet can be profiled in far more detail than now, to identify anyone at risk of wanting to oppose the future abuse of future far better AI, to vastly increase their control over people. Which in the end will prevent anyone from speaking out openly against the people in power. Narcissists desperately want more power over people.

Its possibly the single biggest issue we will end up facing in AI and robotics this century. Its not the danger of AI taking over (AI isn’t inherently Narcissistic, (because Narcissism is ultimately driven by fear (fear of having anyone else ever have power over them again, the way they suffered excessive parental control as a child), but a minority of society are Narcissistic. We are already getting far more innocent people on government lists (e.g. like 2 million followers of the “Royal Society for the Protection of Birds”. Why? because their members can oppose government plans, which risk affecting habits, not because they are criminals, but because they are innocent people who care enough to stand up and oppose the two faced Narcissists in government and power).

If ieee moves to open posting then no problem, even if it requires a login ok, but not a login with the most Orwellian companies. No point in helping these companies now. We have a few more years to speak openly on most of the Internet, without having to fear past posts (exactly like this one), but on these most Orwellian companies, they are already profiling people for the future. :(

Sorry for this long final post, but it had to be said about ieee’s login method. Anyway this is my final post on BotJunkie and I have to do this one anon. :( … Good luck in the future and goodbye to everyone. :(

I’d like to third (fourth?) le_sacre’s comments about the RSS feed. I like to view BotJunkie in my RSS Reader at work, but our internet is monitored. As such, too many hits to non-work related sites could be a bad thing. With my RSS Reader, I can get the info I need, and check back later to read in depth on my own time. The IEEE RSS blurbs are useless to me and I’ll have to stop following if this can’t be changed. This would make me very unhappy as BotJunkie is (was?) one of my daily favorites.

Regardless of this I’m very happy for you and hope that the change-over goes smoothly and you’re happy in your new blog-home.

IEEE has always been spammy in all that they do (Including sending physical junkmail to my house). Worried your (excellent) posts will get washed away in by their torrents.
My $.02

IEEE likes BotJunkie ’cause we’re BotJunkie, and when we move over there, we’re going to keep things snarky and fun and keep writing about what we like to write about. Just because IEEE is a professional organization doesn’t mean we’re going to turn all professional. We’ll have the same type of coverage that you know (and hopefully) love