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.

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.

FaveBot as a Blogging Tool

As a long time blogger (I started in April 2003) I know how useful FaveBot can be to bloggers. In fact, it was blogging that exposed me to RSS and subscribing to content. So it wasn’t a surprise to me when I saw the following blogging tip in an interview with “Original Blogger Jorn Barger”:

Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger

9. Pick some favorite authors or celebrities and create a Google News feed that tracks new mentions of them, so other fans can follow them via your weblog.

Hmm, that’s exactly what you can do with FaveBot. But instead of just news, FaveBot will discover events, blog posts, photos, videos, books, music, podcasts and/or DVDs in one shot. The obvious use of FaveBot is as a research / tracking tool. You could also take any of the RSS feeds generated by FaveBot and simply display that on your blog. For example, I’m displaying my FaveBot ‘Ruby on Rails’ discoveries over in the sidebar of this blog.

You could also use a widget from the likes of Grazr, SpringWidgets or WidgetBox to display your feeds on your blog. It’s quite simple to take all the great content FaveBot discovers for you and power your blog. So whether you want to track ‘iPod Touch‘, ‘Web 2.0‘ or ‘Amy Winehouse‘, FaveBot’s got you covered.

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.

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.

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:

First, you’ll need to get the URL of your feed. Go back to FaveBot and make sure you’re logged in. Click on the RSS icon which looks like this:

After clicking the icon your RSS feed’s URL will be displayed in your browser’s address bar. Copy that URL to your clipboard for use in one of the following subscription scenarios:

Option 1: To Subscribe via FeedBlitz: just follow their instructions.

Option 2: To Subscribe via SendMeRSS: paste your feed’s URL into the form where it asks for ‘RSS Feed URL’. After you’ve filled out the rest of the form click the ‘Add Feed’ button.

Option 3: Follow these directions if you use Thunderbird as your email client.

Option 4: If you use Yahoo Mail, log in to your email account and click the ‘Add’ link next to ‘All Feeds’ (see image below)

That will open another window. On that new window, paste your feed’s URL into form where it says ‘Enter keyword or feed URL’ then click the ‘Go’ button.

Option 5: You can use a Yahoo Alert to have your FaveBot Discoveries sent to any email address. After logging in to FaveBot you should see a button to add your feed to ‘My Yahoo’:

After clicking that button click the ‘Add an Alert’ link on the resulting page:

That will take you to another page with several options including your email address and how often you want to be sent updates. I suggest choosing to be updated once per day.

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.

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.

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.