EDIT: No Kings TV is up at https://searchtweaks.com/nkt/ . I’ve done the initial sweep of the top 20 markets and after finding all the RSS I could I’ve got 73 resources listed. More will be added as I go through the resources listed in US Local News Search, but I need to let my brain […]
RSS With An Expiration Date: The Temporary Obsessions Feed Reader
I love RSS; I literally couldn’t do my self-appointed job without it. But when it comes to temporarily monitoring topics, RSS feeds are a bit unwieldy; you have to add another layer of workflow to add/remove feeds, set up reminders for yourself, etc. All that has hitherto discouraged me from using RSS when there was […]
Introducing MiniGladys for Fast Wikipedia-Based Search and Research
As you might imagine, I do a lot of web search in the course of my day. Often these queries are quick reference lookups; I need to find a company’s social media, for example, or I want to see how to spell someone’s name. Unfortunately these kinds of searches on Google are being met more […]
Wikipedia Seismograph: Using Date-Based News Search to Avoid Puff Pieces
I’ve been following the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni situation. Lately it’s strayed into PR / crisis management. One of the commentary channels I listen to mentioned today that celebrities might put out tons of stories and puff pieces to “push down” less-flattering results in Google searches. But that won’t work with Wikipedia Seismograph! WS […]
What’s Going on With Dick York’s Wikipedia Page?
Wikipedia Hot Topics has handed me a mystery. The site takes one of Wikipedia’s daily top 1000 article lists and reorganizes it by recent increases in page views (as opposed to overall page views). The reordered list provides an overview from Wikipedia, page view information, links to date-bounded Google News searches for the page’s most-visited […]
VibesMasto Gets an Overhaul and a Web Version
Saturday I dug out the VibesMasto News Monitor so I could monitor news about the protests around the country. It was very useful but it also made me cringe. I first made this tool about two years ago when I knew a lot less about JavaScript, and its code is CRUSTY. Uncrusting it became yesterday’s […]
Monitoring Protest Hashtags With VibesMasto
Can’t go to the protests today but you still want to know what’s going on? Check out this tool I made to monitor hashtags at the larger Mastodon instances and aggregate them into a browser tab that refreshes automatically. I set it up because I have a tiny instance and our news flow isn’t great. […]
“Protest” as a Wikipedia Topic for Public Interest
After the protests this weekend, I wondered if there had been a surge in public interest in the general Wikipedia topic of “protest.” So I plugged it into Wikipedia Seismograph to find out. Oh yes, there absolutely was. This also gave me a chance to test Wikipedia Attention Surfer to see what other topics were […]
Grouping Concepts Temporally Instead of Topically, Using Wikipedia Data
There’s been so much talk about “vibes” in programming lately that it gave me an idea for a Wikipedia tool. If you accept the idea that Wikipedia page view data can be used as “fossilized attention” (indicators of public interest in a topic) then you can use information extracted from page view data — like […]
Video: How to Use US Local News Search
If you’ve got two minutes and seventeen seconds to spare, I can teach you how to use the US Local News Search. Enter in a city and state and discover the TV stations which serve that city as well as the newspapers and NPR stations which serve the state. Select up to 25 sources from […]