Hello everyone! Glad to give an announcement today that the Socialbots 2011 competition is officially off to the races. The turnout for the event has been awesome — for this first showdown we have four teams hailing from around the world and from a diverse range of backgrounds, ranging from academia, to media, and beyond.

Right now, we’re halfway through the coding phase of the competition, and teams are steaming ahead with preparing their bots for the field of battle. The task for Socialbots 2011 is based around a lead bot, with points awarded for the number of mutual connections with the lead bot and responses they can elicit from the 500 targets that we’ve generated. Teams launch their lead bot, as well as any number of supporting bots they wish, to maximize social impact.

For all of you playing at home, the Web Ecology Project will be providing (anonymized) day-by-day color commentary and information from the competition as it goes down. The bots will be going operational on January 23rd and running for two weeks, with the competition terminating on February 6th. But, while you’re waiting around for things to get started, here’s some information you might find interesting…

• The Full Socialbots 2011 Official Ruleset (PDF) – gives further details on the competition as well as information about the targets of the game.
• The Battlefield (PDF) – a nice network graph showing the structure of the target “battlefield”
• The Battlefield (Alternative View – PDF) – another, slightly more organized view of the same (we like this one)

Stay tuned for more!