Recently received a URL to your "World Wide Web Robots,
Wanderers, and Spiders" homepage, and wanted to communicate
with you regarding HipCrime's ActiveAgent.
ActiveAgent is a program which traverses the WWW automatically,
and can be guided by a human operator or allowed to work on its
own. It is given a starting URL, and follows links from there
to anywhere, finding/pushing MAILTO buttons all along the way.
ActiveAgent has proven quite effective. In its first trial
runs, it sent out the simplest of messages: a URL, nothing
more. This URL appeared in both the Subject and in the one
line body, and pointed back to HipCrime. After the first
8 hour run, more than a thousand different systems had
appeared in the HipCrime visitor log. Over time, that hit
rate has continued, as word-of-mouth has spread that URL
further than any mass-mailing could've hoped for.
This is ActiveAgent's purpose: to accelerate a site's
acquisition of critical-mass, to thrush a site into the
WWW mass-consciousness. Once many thousand netizens
know about a site, traffic is almost assured. At least
for a moment, after that, one must provide interesting
content.
But, all the content in the world doesn't bring in those
first visitors. Someone or something must go out and
approach people, to invite that first wave of onlookers.
That's ActiveAgent's job.
Attached is your robot-registration form, filled-out as
correctly as possible. You'll notice that ActiveAgent
did not fit into some of your categories.
In particular, it runs on ANY host which provides it, and
can be used by ANYONE. Written in Java, it is an APPLET, not
attached to a particular host, operating system, or whatever.
It does prefer Internet Explorer as its browser, but has been
made to work on a variety of others.
If you've got further questions about ActiveAgent, please
don't hesitate to contact me.
... Robert
robot-id: activeagent
robot-name: ActiveAgent
robot-cover-url: http://www.hipcrime.com
robot-details-url: http://www.hipcrime.com
robot-owner-name: robert returned
robot-owner-url: http://www.hipcrime.com
robot-owner-email: agent@hipcrime.com
robot-status: active
robot-purpose: other
robot-type: applet
robot-platform: all
robot-availability: source
robot-exclusion: no
robot-exclusion-useragent: no
robot-noindex: no
robot-host: anywhere
robot-from: no
robot-useragent: no
robot-language: java
robot-description: crawling email robot and publicity engine
robot-history: hipcrime's Internet art project
robot-environment: research/hobby
modified-date: 10-13-96
modified-by: RR1563