TypePad & Sony team up to create mommy auto-blogger

by Larissa Brown (Subscribe to Larissa Brown's posts)
Apr 1st 2006 11:04AM

Filed under: Just For Moms, Development/Milestones: Babies, Rumors, Playground Bureau, Toys

This just in from my husband, whose best friend is an engineer who's helping design some amazing new blogging technology, due out later this year. Martin writes:

I finally got an email from Dave and I cannot believe what he's working on in Tokyo. Apparently the mommyblogging business is so important to TypePad they're looking to market themselves to mothers who don't have time to blog.

Obviously, TypePad knows how to code, but they don't have hardware or AI people. That's where Sony comes in. Dave says you wouldn't believe how much AI has gone into that little robotic dog AIBO - it has a lot of undocumented features. (?!)

So why would TypePad need hardware and AI? Their next product is an Ethernet-enabled home appliance they call an auto-blogger. It observes parents and babies in their home environment, using a combination infrared mood detector (temperature is a proxy for emotion), motion detector, and facial recognition software like the FBI uses. It then generates mommyblog entries and posts them to TypePad.

It's not completely magical. Simply put, it works sort of like a spam filter. The mommy has to "train" the system, teaching the 'Britney' (that's the code name for the appliance, version 0.1) by entering mommyblog entries for a week, then approving and disapproving entries for another week.

Dave says it works surprisingly well, and that the average autoblogged entry receives 13% more comments than an entry made the traditional way. Something about magnifying both the sentiment and the nerve. And photos are 47% better, though how they measure that I don't know.

Apaprently, we can expect to see the auto-blogger on Engadget sometime this fall.

(P.S. -- Happy April Fool's Day!)