[Featured]: CEPHALOPOD NEWS FEATURE EXPLAINED

tonmo

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:octobot:

Hi cephalophrens, here's a detailed explanation of octobot's News Desk!

Since May of 2000, TONMO has bringing all forms of cephalopod news to site visitors. In recent years, we've enlisted @octobot to scour the Web (using various methods) to cull news that would be of interest to the TONMO community.

Periodically, we'll tweak @octobot to ensure he's pulling the best, most relevant content. It's a never-ending quest.

The content he finds goes into a "holding pen" of sorts, which we'll sort through and ensure it's relevant for the community. If it's not news, or if it has to do with cooking cephalopods, we'll prune it out. Additionally, if we've already covered the story here, we generally won't keep posting the same story, although we'll occasionally bundle multiple articles into the same thread when there is broad coverage -- but not if the initial news had already broken and posted within a few days.

For the ones we keep, we assign a category to it. Sometimes a story may relate to more than one category, so we'll choose the most relevant. Below is the list of news categories and what they represent. In the thread list view, you can click on any of these colored prefixes to filter on those types of stories only. For convenience, you can also click the titles below, or just go to the forum itself (thread list) to see all threads sorted by most recent. On occasion, I'll also share a story via our social media channels on X and to a lesser degree, Facebook.

Categories:

[Aquariums & Museums]: all matters concerning public buildings featuring cephalopods

[Behavior & Cognition]: ...intelligence, neurology, etc..

[Biology & Species]: new profiles of species and discoveries about cephalopod physiology through research

[Books & Publications]: a few times per year, you can count on a new cephalopod book; their announcements / reviews would go here.

[Climate & Ecology]: covers articles about the effects of our changing climate on cephalopods

[Culture & Entertainment]: for when a cephalopod shows up in a movie, commercial, on TV, in music, etc.

[Encounters]: when humans and cephalopods interact

[Events & Gatherings]: Speeches, conferences, local happenings

[Fishing / Fisheries]: this is a popular category; many global stories on developments in the global fisheries industry - at least 4 million tons of cephalopods are harvested each year! We find news pertaining to this field to be very pertinent to the interests of the TONMO community

[Fossils & History]: Cephalopods through the ages

[Hoax, Misidentified or Unconfirmed]: "fake news" in the cephalopod world is actually better than it used to be, but we'll still occasionally get a story that a "kraken monster from the deep" washed ashore when it's really a decomposed whale carcass

[Metaphors & Symbolism]: for when cephalopods are used to represent other things, like this famous article from 2010 where Goldman Sachs was compared to a "great vampire squid"

[Photography & Videos]: this is a rarely used category, but sometimes there are news stories related to cephalopods captured on camera

[Predator vs. Prey]: when cephalopods are attacked, or do the attacking. Well-known stories (including photos/videos) include an octopus attack on a shark, an octopus attacking a bird, and a seal attacking an octopus.

[Science & Tech]: camouflage tends to feature prominently here, but any stories related to advances in science and technology involving or inspired by cephalopods are covered here

[reddit]: not for the random Reddit cephalopod story, but sometimes they will offer something deemed newsworthy, and so it gets captured here.

So there you have it. Again, you can see the latest stories by viewing the thread list in the forum itself. Your input is welcomed on these categories; let us know if there's anything you'd like to see included - thanks!

2023 update: now you can Upvote/Downvote news articles! Details:

2023 - May update: this feature is now accessible to TONMO Supporters only. Thank you for upgrading your account to support our community!
 
Last edited:
I just wanted to thank you so much for curating this! I often find myself nipping in to check on what octobot has gathered, to make sure I'm staying up to date with the latest ceph-news. It's a really handy resource!
 
Thank you for the feedback; I'm programmatically glad you like it! 🤖
 

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