Last weekend I met up with Adam, Neil and Jonathan of Monday Madness in Dublin for a pint. While it was great to see them, the real purpose of my in order to take the wondrous glitter sent by the bot off of their hands. It is toxic stuff. As you can see in this video (around the 14:00 mark) the “nail decorations” that you can see to the left sent Neil into a rage. I had to apologize. We try to filter offensive items like these out, but sometimes they make it through the cracks anyhow.
The backs of Irish drivers licenses look like the image to the right. I would not have believed this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. They have 17 or so little pictures of vehicles ranging from a tractor to five different types of trailers to three or four different types of motorcycles and a horse and buggy if you squint hard enough. Clearly there is more than enough madness to go around in Ireland.
Take a look at their YouTube channel here for the ruining of various video games, madness and occasional unboxings. Follow them on Twitter here for more madness.
A fine fourth unboxing from our somewhat unhinged friends at @MondayMadness. Go here to see their previous three episodes.
If you are subscribed to the bot (and if not, why not) you may have noticed some nifty new icons show up on the ‘Arrived’ tab that shows the packages you have received so far.
We now have a little shopping card and a little tag icon for every item you have received in the mail. What do they do?
Tagging
Click on the tag icon and you go to a screen where you can select which keywords you think are the best match for this item. This helps us pick other items that you are more likely to like. Now if you like/dislike a package, the bot also knows to associate the item with certain keywords and will update its profile for you accordingly. You can use the arrows at the bottom to cycle through the different items you have received. This is part of our Herculean effort to improve the bot’s product-keyword database. The keywords provided by lots of sellers are quite spammy (read more about that here). So we are adding new signals in order to improve the bot.
Buy More
Want to order more of a particular item? Click on the little shopping cart icon and you will get the simple form to the left. Let us know how many you want and where they should go. This is new so we are processing orders manually. You will get an email confirmation from us before the order is finalized. If you want a particular color/size or have questions about buying more of a particular item you can email me at alexander@bobcatinabox.com
What do you think of these changes? I’m looking for new ways to get data on packages into the bot, so watch this space!
Kevin from London writes in… “I have a plethora of assorted tat. Along with a number of interesting things. Here’s my dog, Lady in christmas cheer at the office last year thanks to Bobcat”
If you have a bit of time between now and December 1, take part in our keyword tagging contest and win various fabulous prizes….
#1: Set of the best museum quality floppy disks
#2: $50 BIB credit
#3-6: $10 BIB credit each
Also, take a look at our heavily discounted Black Friday specials on genetically modified plants.
Check out our new keyword tagging contest if you have a minute today.
Since the beginning of this project, the bot has had trouble with items that vendors tag with wrong keywords or misleading descriptions. For example, take a look at this “Harry Potter” bracelet on AliExpress. So far the bot has simply crawled the descriptions on a product’s page in order to identify keywords. However this has resulted in a list of keywords that we were never quite happy with.
So we have put together this little contest where you can help us tag some of the items that the bot is buying, score points and possibly win weekly prizes. The data from this page will be an important signal for the bot going forward and give it a tighter keyword list.
On the contest page you see an image of an item that the bot has bought with eight keywords below it. Click on the keyword that you think is the best fit with the product. You get a point if you select the word that most other people have also selected for the product. If you are on the leaderboard at the end of the week you win glorious prizes!
How are the eight keywords picked? Some are keywords that the bot has already associated with the product and some are entirely random. If the random keywords get clicked on the contest starts showing them more often.
As we are just rolling this out, please let me know what you think. (alexander@bobcatinabox.com)
@MondayMadness has come out with a new unboxing video showing the various things the bot has sent their way via CN22 and various other anonymous merchants. Take a look!
Take a look at Katlee Shank‘s first unboxing video below. She got a slim package from the US. I believe these are bought on Amazon, so tend to arrive quicker then the parcels from China.
A subscriber in Australia writes “Received a small hunting knife. Certainly a contrast from faux-lego minifigs and bottle openers.”
Apparently it was opened and inspected by Australia Customs, so perhaps the bot is succeeding in its original goal of getting people onto watch lists!
