 | In part 3 of this series, I will look at resources that will allow you to follow a general topic of interest, and to receive information on that topic via RSS feeds. Just a reminder - links to all of the hacks in this series are available as a OPML file and as a HTML directory for later ease of use. If you have any hacks you wish to contribute, feel free to add comments or trackbacks to the posts, and I will add them to the list. |
| 21. Tracking information of interest using Feedster |
| Feedster is a search engine which focuses on RSS feeds. From Feedster's help page, "The type of content available in feeds makes Feedster great for finding the latest news and opinion on any topic." |
| To get started, go to the Feedster home page and enter a search term or terms and press the Search button. A results page will appear with a list of results. You can subscribe to your search query as a RSS feed by saving the link from the orange XML button at the top of the results page. |
| Feedster offers a list of advanced search tips. To search on specific elements within RSS feeds, such as the title, URL, and other elements, type the element name, followed by a colon, followed by the element content. For example, "site: craiglist.org" will find items from all Craiglist sites. See Searchable Fields for more information. |
| 22. Tracking information of interest using PubSub |
| From PubSub's About page, "PubSub is a matching service that instantly notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription.". To use PubSub, you can create subscriptions for any search term or terms. This could be a name, a URL, anything. PubSub tracks over 18 million weblogs, 50,000 newsgroups, and and all SEC filings - quite a flow of data! |
| To get started, go to the PubSub home page. You will see an area at the top of the page labeled "Start using the PubSub Matching Engine!". Next to the number 1, there is a text box for you to type your search term or terms. Enter your terms in the text box, then click on the "Start Searching Now!" button next to the number 2. A results page will appear informing you that the subscription has been created and listing several ways that you can access the results. You can click on the name of the subscription on the left side of the page. This will present the results as a new web page. You can also save the subscription as a RSS feed to using in your RSS reader or aggregator by clicking on the RSS buttons at the bottom of the results page. |
| Another useful way to create a subscription is include a part of a URL as the search term. The Subscription Syntax page gives the following format example: "URI: amazon.com". This subscription will only return pages that contain a hyperlink to amazon.com. You can also search on other attributes (see the Subscription Syntax page for more details). |
| 23. Tracking information of interest using Technorati |
| Technorati is a search engine focusing on weblogs. From their About page, Technorati is currently tracking 21.9 million sites and 1.7 billion links. |
| To get started, go to the Technorati home page and enter a search term or terms and press the Search button. A results page will appear with weblog posts ranked most recent to oldest. |
| To be able to perform Technorati searches and get the results via RSS, you need to create an account with Technorati. After you have an account, you will see a search text box for Watchlists. Enter your search term and press the Add button. You will get a results page similar to the earlier page, but now a blue RSS button will appear at the bottom of the page. You can add the link from this button to your RSS reader or aggregator. |
| Another Technorati search option is searching weblog posts that have been "tagged" with text describing the topic or topics covered in the post. The tagging information comes from Technorati as well as the Delicious and Furl services, and the Flickr and Buzznet photo services. To perform a tag search, click on the Tags item at the top of the Technorati home page. Enter a search term or terms in the text box and click on the Search button. A results page will appear with recent weblog posts that have been tagged with that search term. A blue RSS button will appear at the bottom of the page. You can add the link from this button to your RSS reader or aggregator. |
| 24. Tracking information of interest using Gada.be |
| Gada.be is a metasearch engine collecting search results from 140 search services. To use the service for general searches, you can go to the main page, type in a search term or terms, select the "default" option from the drop-down box, and click on the "Go" button. The search results page will show headlines from a number of search engines for the search terms. To select a different category of search, click on the drop-down box next to the search text box, select a different category, and click on the "go" button. |
| After generating the results page, you can add a "/opml" to the end of the search URL and get a OPML file with search queries for a number of search engines using the the search terms you entered in the gada.be search. This file can then be imported into your favorite RSS reader to generate more search results on demand. Chris Pirillo has more information on using Gada.be in his initial announcement of the Gada.be service and in this update on the capabilities of Gada.be. |
| 25. Tracking information of interest using Delicious |
| Delicious tracks weblog posts that are "tagged" by other Delicious users. To perform basic searches on tags, go to the main page, enter a search term or terms in the "Discover Favorites" text box and press the Search button. A results page will appear with items that have been tagged with those terms. |
| Delicious has a number of tag searches available via RSS. These include the "recent" tags (items that have been tagged within a short period of time before your request) and "popular" tage (items tagged by many people). At the bottom of these pages, there is an orange RSS icon. You can add the link from this icon to your RSS reader or aggregator. On the right side of the "popular" page, there are a list of other popular tags. You can click on those pages and use the RSS link at the bottom of the page to subscribe to those results. |
| You can also create URLs for RSS feeds on a particular tag by adding"/rss/tag/" to the end of the Delicious URL and then adding the tag name (for example, rugby). The RSS help page covers other types of URLs for RSS feeds. |
| To be able to monitor groups of tagged items of interest on Delicious using RSS, sign up for a Delicious account from the main page. When your account is set up, you will have an "inbox" that you can add tag searches to, then subscribe to the results via RSS. To add a search, click on the "inbox" link once you are logged into Delicious. Next, click on the "edit inbox" link on the right side of the page. Next, add a tag name to the tag text box under the "subscribe" label. Finally, click on "jump to inbox" to start looking at your subscriptions. A orange RSS button will appear at the bottom of the page. You can add the link from this button to your RSS reader or aggregator. |
| 26. Tracking information of interest using Furl.net |
| From the Furl About page, "Furl is a free service that saves the important items you find on the Web and enables you to quickly find them again.". As you find pages that you want to save, you can add them to your Furl archive (up to 5 Gigabytes). |
| When you "furl" a web page you create a bookmark to that page. These bookmarks are displayed on your account page. Furl will create a RSS feed for those bookmarks with the following URL: http://www.furl.net/members//rss.xml. You can subscribe to this RSS feed or send it to others so they can subscribe to the feed. |
| Furl also creates a general RSS feed for the latest activity from all members. You can subscribe to this feed at http://www.furl.net/members/rss.xml. From the Furl FAQ page, "feeds can be filtered by topic by adding "?topic=topicName" at the end of the URL. For example the RSS URL for the Science topic for all members would be http://www.furl.net/members/rss.xml?topic=Science." This can be done for specific member feeds or for the general member feed. |
| 27. Tracking information of interest using MonitorThis |
| From the MonitorThis home page, "you can subscribe to 22 different search engine feeds at the same time. Enter a search term and click the 'make monitor.opml' button to get a list of rss feeds in OPML format." |
| To use the service, go to the home page and scroll down to the text box near the bottom of the page under "Enter search term". Add your search term or terms and click on the "make monitor.opml" button. In the text box below, you will see the text of an OPML outline that you can import into your RSS reader or aggregator to subscribe to the 22 search engines for your search terms. To do that, select the OPML text, save it as a new OPML file, then import the file into your RSS reader. |
| 28. Tracking information of interest using BlogDigger |
| From the BlogDigger services page, " Blogdigger uses state of the art syndication technologies, such as RSS and Atom, to index blog content and make it available for search. Blogdigger also makes all search results available in RSS or Atom, so users can subscribe to keyword searches and automatically be notified, via the News Aggregator of their choice, of new content pertaining to their interests." |
| To use the Blog Search features of BlogDigger, go to the home page, enter a search term or terms and click on the Search button. The default search results will be organized by date, but you can select "relevance" instead of "date" on the home page. The results page will display a orange XML button and a blue Atom button on the right side of the page. You can add the links from these buttons to your RSS reader or aggregator to subscribe to search results in RSS. |
| 29. Tracking information of interest using Blogpulse |
| From the BlogPulse About page, "BlogPulse.com is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere." In addition to general search, they offer a number of services to help you track blogging activity on key issues and perform trend analysis. |
| To use the blog search features of Blogpulse, go to the home page, enter your search term or terms in the text box under "Search the Blogosphere" and click on the "Go" button. The default search results will be displayed with the most recent items first. At the top of the result page, you will find a orange XML button. You can add the links from these button to your RSS reader or aggregator to subscribe to search results in RSS. An advanced search options page is available with date range and sorting criteria, as well as other options. If you select other options besides the default, these will be included in the RSS search feed. |
| 30. Tracking information of interest using general search engines |
| Most of the resources in this list are search engines focusing on RSS feeds. However, all of the general search engines referred to in the list on searching for news can also be used to search for other items of interest and provide search queries as RSS feeds. These include NewsIsFree, Moreover, Google (using the GooRSS service), Topix.net, RocketNews, and MSN Search. |
| Other Resources |
| Roland Tanglao's Becoming a Newsmaster Series |
| Part 1 - Use PubSub to track your URL, name and keywords |
| Part 2 - Use Feedster to search retrospectively for your name and keywords |
| Part 3 - How to be a NewsMaster |
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Wednesday, December 7, 2005
