11.18.07

BlogSpot and .info banned!

Posted in FaveBot, Internet tagged , , , , , , , at 12:42 pm by tradermike

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:

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.

11.10.07

How to Subscribe to Your FaveBot Discoveries by email

Posted in FaveBot, Internet tagged , , , , , , at 1:43 pm by tradermike

I just turned on RSS feeds for FaveBot. So now you can view your discoveries wherever you want, not just on FaveBot’s site. If you’re unfamiliar with RSS, here’s a great video explaining what it is and why you would want to use it. For the best experience with RSS, I suggest using a full-blown feed reader. My favorite is Bloglines but many people prefer Google Reader. If you’d rather get your FaveBot discoveries delivered to you via email here are some options:
Read the rest of this entry »

11.08.07

Big Changes Coming This Weekend!

Posted in FaveBot, Internet tagged , , , , at 11:41 am by tradermike

I was hoping to keep FaveBot under the radar for another week or so. That’s because I have several changes/improvements I need to make and I wanted to do them before a lot of people started using the site. The rash of reviews this week (thanks guys!) has made me accelerate my schedule a bit. So here’s what’s changing:

  • Mass Deletion — Right now users are able to delete discoveries one at a time via a button. I’m going to do away with that and instead allow users to select any of the displayed discoveries for deletion. There will be a button to ’select all’ and another button to delete all the selected discoveries.
  • RSS Feeds — At a minimum I’ll provide one RSS feed per user containing the most recent 100 of that user’s discoveries. I’ve had requests for feeds for each tracking’s discoveries as well. In other words, if I’m tracking ‘Facebook Applications’ and ‘Boston Celtics’ I’ll have access to a feed for ‘Facebook Applications’ and a feed for ‘Boston Celtics’. I’ll try to get that working this weekend but that one may take another few days.
  • Book Search — You may have noticed that no book discoveries have appeared for you. That’s because I haven’t yet written the book search. That should be working by Monday.

11.07.07

Examples of What You Can Do with FaveBot

Posted in FaveBot, Internet tagged , at 3:43 am by tradermike

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.