Spellbot

As part of the day job I’ve had an index built that is fed from limited web crawling and blog pings. The point is to feed a data warehouse that is used for social media research and analysis, the sort of thing you might use Technorati to do manually until you realize just how big the blogosphere actually is.

We’ve had lots of ideas for how to use this infrastructure to do other things: some just silly, some promising, and a few that would be fun but just can’t be justified. In the latter category is tonight’s thought.

We’ve toyed with the idea of taking some of the fun out of QA’s life by pre-scanning content for spelling and punctuation errors. Perhaps that same code could be aimed at blog posts, automatically adding comments that offer corrections. We could then accuse people who use human-detection of being pansies that are afraid of spellcheck.

Obviously we’d never actually be so rude. Well, maybe to splogs. Spamming the spammers with “I think you ought to capitalize Viagra” comments could be fun.