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 […]
Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader Updated and Now Available
Last month I made a tool called the Temporary Obsessions Feed Reader (you can see my writeup here.) The TOFR is a Google Sheets-based tool that lets you schedule your RSS feeds and give them expiration dates. This is a powerful feature when you combine it with keyword-based RSS feeds. I have used TOFR for […]
Finding the “Main Characters” in Wikipedia Categories
If I gave you a list of twenty people from Wikipedia and told you to list them in order of cultural prominence without consulting an external reference, how would you do it? You’d probably start by identifying people you know. You’d use your knowledge to sort them as best you could. But what about the […]
Hooking the ProPublica Congress API and the FCC Licensing API together and pointing them at Google
This recent political stuff has impressed upon me that I should be doing more to connect politician data to local news data. Furthermore, as long as I’m doing that I should be making news monitoring tools. So that’s what I’ve been doodling around with today. Here’s how it works – currently I’m working on just […]
Making a MegaGladys
WordPress is great when you need to maintain an blog or some other kind of archive, but if you don’t need that functionality it can be annoying. None of the tools on SearchGizmos.com , for example, work on your phone due to some kind of conflict between my JavaScript and WordPress’ JavaScript. So I’ve been […]