I’m having so much fun playing with Raleigh’s tree dataset and giving the trees something to say. Today I gave the trees some hyperlocal news mojo. How it works: when you ask a tree for local news, the program checks to find streets nearby. It then uses a news API to check WRAL, WTVD, and […]
AI Is Better With Human Attention As Search Context
Human attention as context for Internet search is immensely powerful. Having an understanding of WHEN a topic was of particular interest allows you to create date-bounded searches that provide more information-rich results and less junk. Which is why it drives me absolutely bonkers that we have a gold mine of human attention records in the […]
“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 […]
Gossip Machine As An Information Trap
Hot diggity! I made my first Web monitoring tool! If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ve heard me talk about Gossip Machine. At its core, Gossip Machine analyzes a Wikipedia article’s page views over a given time period and identifies days with unusually high page views. The idea is that audience attention […]