04.28.08
Problems with FireFox 3 Beta 5
I just discovered that there’s an issue with using FireFox 3 Beta 5 (and possibly other beta versions) with FaveBot. If you’re using that beta version you will not be able to create new items to track. I’m trying to figure out a fix for the problem (I think it’s an issue with Prototype javascript / AJAX) but for now you’ll have to use another browser — try Firefox 2.x, IE 6 or 7 or Safari.
01.28.08
BlogSpot Unbanned
In November I mentioned that I had to ban all blogger / blogspot blogs from FaveBot due to the high level of spam blogs (splogs). Google blog search seems to be doing a better job of filtering those splogs out so I’ve lifted the blogspot ban. I hope their spam filtering continues to improve. I’ll be watching closely.
12.11.07
A Sample FaveBot User Tracking Stocks, Finance & Economic Information
Here’s a post I wrote for my other blog showing how you can use FaveBot to track stock market & other financial information:
Some of you know about FaveBot.com, which I’ve been building since this summer. FaveBot is a software agent (robot) that continuously searches the web for “stuff” of interest to you. That stuff could be any of the following:
- Local Events
- Blog Posts
- Books (New Releases)
- DVDs (New Releases)
- MP3s / CDs (New Releases)
- News Articles
- Photos
- Podcasts
- Online Videos
FaveBot can track those things for whatever topics you specify. So you could track your favorite sports teams, actors, musicians, hobbies, etc. But I wanted to show how you can use FaveBot to track stock market / finance related content. The advantage FaveBot has over, say, Yahoo Finance, is that it searches so many different media types. For example, there’s a lot of good financial content ‘buired’ in audio and video files that’s not picked up by Yahoo Finance. FaveBot will find that content for you if you choose to track podcasts and/or videos. Ditto for blogs.
To demonstrate FaveBot I set up a user, TraderMike, who’s based in New York. (the location is important for event tracking) There are two main areas of FaveBot. First is the user’s tracking list. That’s the list of topics (keywords) that the user has entered. Second is the “discoveries” list. That is the list of what FaveBot has found to match the user’s tracking list. You can choose to view all discoveries together or just the discoveries for one topic at a time.
Here’s a portion of the tracking list:
The tracking list is basically a control panel. Use the ‘New Tracking’ link to add a topic to be tracked. When you’re logged in you’ll see checkboxes next to each of your topics. You can turn those on & off from this page as well. You’ll also notice that there are numbers in parenthesis after each topic’s name. Clicking that number will take you to the discoveries for that topic. Likewise, clicking the Orange RSS button will give you the RSS feed for that topic.
Feel free to click over to FaveBot and see what it’s discovered for the 20 topics TraderMike is tracking. Here is TraderMike’s tracking list and here’s where you can see all of TraderMike’s discoveries across all his topics (equivalent to clicking the ‘discoveries’ tab when you’re logged in).
If you’d like to set up your own list, just go to the sign up page. Once you’ve got your list set you can have your discoveries sent to you via RSS (e.g. add them to your My Yahoo page) or via email. Please let me know if you have any questions and/or feedback.
11.18.07
BlogSpot and .info banned!
I’ve had a few people ask me why a certain blog didn’t show up in their FaveBot discoveries. Each of those blogs I was asked about was hosted on Google’s Blogger/BlogSpot service. Unfortunately I had to ban all BlogSpot blogs because of the huge amount of spam (splogs) coming from blogspot-hosted sites. Yes, this is the same problem Mark Cuban wrote about over two years ago when he was considering blocking blogspot blogs from IceRocket:
- Get Your Blogspot Shit Together Google
- A splog here, a splog there, pretty soon it ads up… and we all lose
I’ve long known about the splog problem on BlogSpot but I was surprised to see so many in FaveBot’s blog search results. That’s because FaveBot is using Google Blog Search for searching blogs. I figured that Google’s sophisticated would filter out the splogs. Wrong! So I had to take matters into my own hands. I hated to do it because there are good, legitimate blogs hosted on blogspot. But the signal-to-noise ratio was just way too low.
Banning blogspot probably cut spammy results by 85%. I also had to ban all .info sites. Most bloggers know about all the comment spam that comes from .info and all the splogs on .info which steal other bloggers’ content. Banning .info probably cut another 10% of the spam. I’m also blocking certain other blogs based on their domain or certain words in their urls. If you see spammy results in FaveBot and can identify a pattern in them please let me know.
11.07.07
Examples of What You Can Do with FaveBot
FaveBot searches the web and discovers new content matching your favorite things. Just set up the list of what you want to track and FaveBot will do the searching for you, day after day.
Here are some example to give you an idea of what you can with FaveBot. Let’s say I sign up as user named MikeInNewYork. I want to track events near me (in New York City) so I enter my location. Then I set up my tracking list which could contain any or all of the following:
- News, videos (highlights), photos, newly released DVDs and events (games) near me for my favorite sports teams and athletes. (e.g. Pittsburgh Steelers, Duke Blue Devils, Ronaldinho)
- New music (CDs & MP3s) releases by my favorite musicians. I can enter a list manually or import all my artists from iTunes.
- For the musicians that I really like I also want to track concerts (events), YouTube videos, podcasts, new DVDs, news articles, photos and podcasts. (e.g. Alicia Keys, Foo Fighters, Kanye West)
- Blog posts, news, podcasts & video about stocks / companies in my portfolio (Amazon.com Inc, AAPL, Under Armour, Inc.)
- Events, new books & DVDs related to some of my hobbies. (e.g. Tai-Chi, cooking, photography)
- News, blog posts, events, videos & podcasts about my favorite (or least favorite) politicians. (e.g. Barack Obama)
- Photos & videos of my favorite places (Hawaii), people (Angelina Jolie) & things (Ferrari)
- New books and local appearances (events) by my favorite authors (e.g. John Grisham) and artists (Annie Leibovitz)
- Many other things — whatever topics I blog about, info about some place I want to visit, product reviews, etc.
The results of my trackings list shows up as my continuously updated “discoveries” on the “My Discoveries” tab.
07.16.07
What Will Web 3.0 Be?
Here’s an interesting article about the future of the web — How To Define Web 3.0. I especially like the part about software agents:
Programs that surf the web for you will become more and more powerful. In a world where your personal profile containing your likes, dislikes and search history is as easy to upload as it is to add a feed to your RSS reader, it is no surprise that a major industry will be software that does your searching for you.
Imagine a scenario where you want to find a new camera. Since you have personal meme map containing a listing of all the cameras you have ever searched and this list is ordered by the frequency of those searches, you can set your software agent to continue this search for you in your absence. When you return home you would be presented with a list of sites ordered by price, relevance (to you) and features that have been found based on your preference. What you do with this list is fed back into the system, improving future searches.
