For the last few months assembling ResearchBuzz has been increasingly frustrating. AI news was crowding out most of the other categories and I felt like the newsletter itself was getting much too AI-heavy. Things finally came to a head when I found myself with a 6200-item RSS backlog and 50 articles in my newsletter queue, […]
Getting a Grip on My RSS Flow With Keyword Filtering and Anthropic
I love my local news RSS feeds and you’ll have to pry them from my cold dead feed reader, but they are absolutely flooding me with feed items. I’ve been spending the last week or so trying to build a filtering system that would make the information flow a little more manageable. Finally this evening […]
Building a Local News Aggregator With 1000+ Sources
Last week I went poking around and found a local news sources dataset from the Media and Democracy Project. I used that as a quarry and mined it for RSS feeds with a couple of Google Apps Scripts. I’m not finished with that dataset but so far I’ve come up with 1008 verified RSS feeds for local news sources in America.
Topical Monitoring Via Wikipedia Categories
I have mentioned a book I wrote called Information Trapping. It was about using tools like keyword-based RSS feeds and Google Alerts to curate content across the Web. Fast forward 18 years later and, while keyword-based news RSS feeds are still useful, I’m finding Google Alerts increasingly clogged with junk. That’s why I’m trying to idea of monitoring Wikipedia categories to watch topics that aren’t easily defined by keyword-based RSS feeds.
Your Regular Reminder That Tons of People Are On Reddit
Wow, I just got a serious reminder of the Power of Reddit. I’m making a new tool to monitor breakout pages in specified Wikipedia categories as a new kind of topical information trap. One of the test categories I’m using is Androgynous people and that’s how I found out about an 18th/19th century preacher named […]
ResearchBuzz Firehose Turns 10
I started ResearchBuzz in 1998 after finishing the 2nd edition of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research. As time went by I started feeling the lack of organization. I was linking to and looking at lots and lots of resources, but I was posting them in aggregate newsletters which made specific resources tough to find. […]
My Dream RSS Reader is Working WAY Too Well
In late November I put together a homebrew RSS reader to address some of my challenges in trying to keep up with thousands of RSS feeds. I knew at the time that I wasn’t going to immediately get a sense of how well it worked because we were heading into the December holidays. I’d have […]
Keep An Eye on the Fediverse With the Mastodon Hashtag Monitor
Over 15 years ago I wrote a book called Information Trapping. It was about how to set up online monitors to find online information around certain keywords and keep it coming as a flow to you via tools like RSS, page monitors, etc. As you might imagine, Information Trapping’s resources and tool listings are very […]
Adding a Date Mode to My Google Alerts Replacement
If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you may remember me talking about the idea of persistent metadata. By “persistent metadata,” I mean that every thing in a physical universe can be identified by WHERE they are and WHEN they are. A person is born here, educated here, works here, moved here, died […]
“Barbie’s Dream Google Alerts”
I’ve spent today, around my visit to Granny, making “Barbie’s Dream Alerts” with Google Apps Script and a Google Sheet. 😂 (No, I’m not going to call them that. I’m going to call them Calishat Snaps.) There’s some functionality I’ve always missed in Google Alerts that I decided I wanted in my version, so my […]