Local Search America is free to use and free of advertising. In this article I’m going to walk you through its three tools to find local TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher learning near Portland and search their Web sites. We’ll start with Local News TV.
Putting Together an AI-Free Similar RSS Feed Finder (Featuring WordPress)
Been thinking a lot about RSS lately. I am definitely seeing an uptick in visits to RSSGizmos.com and more blog posts about RSS are showing up in my feed reader. While there are lots of tools out there for keyword-searching RSS feeds, I found myself wanting something to discover RSS feeds with similar content. So […]
Wikipedia Categories + YouTube Channels = TubeTerrain.com
Tube Terrain lets you browse lists of YouTube channels built from Wikipedia categories. Filter by keyword, subscriber count, video count, channel age and more!
A Use Case for TimeCake
People ask me sometimes for “use cases” for the things I make. It’s not something I think about too much — I need something, I create it — but this morning I found something that I think fits well so I wanted to share. Google announced yesterday a new local search app for Windows. When […]
Researching Public Figures in the Epstein Birthday Book, Part I: MiniGladys
MiniGladys is a collection of four Wikipedia-based research tools. In the time it takes for a few clicks and a few reads you can get background on Leon Black, for example, find major news stories linked to him, and discover topics related to him that you might not know about. Here’s how.
QueryAnvil: AI As Search Sidekick Instead of Main Character
I was staring in frustration at the search results when I thought, “I wish I had some way of marking which of these results are useful and which aren’t, and then have an AI analyze the different sets for language use and give me suggestions for how I can revise my search to get more useful stuff and less crap.” Then I thought, “Oh damn, that sounds like a good idea, I should make that.” So I did.
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.
An Updated Version of the OPML Peeler
One of the many web sites I’ve scattered everywhere is RSS Gizmos ( https://rssgizmos.com/ ) which has a number of tools for discovering, creating, and using RSS. One of them is OPML Peeler, which takes an OPML file (OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language; an OPML file in this context is basically a bundle […]
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 […]
Blaugust: Four Tools for Easier Date-Based Searching
Do your Internet research tasks include a lot of date-based searching? I find that date-based searching helps a lot when searching historical (and man do I feel weird saying that about stuff that happened just a couple decades ago) events, companies, people and information. The results you’ll find when searching for something in its contemporary […]