Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a Wikipedia article, break it down by headings, do a word-frequency analysis on each block of text, and then click and toggle the most frequent/unusual words into a search box to build Google queries for that topic Well guess what!
RSSForager — RSS Feed Discovery Featuring WordPress
RSSForager uses WordPress to find RSS feeds with similar content to the feed or text block of your choice. Here’s how it works.
Exploring “War-Torn” Portland With Local Search America
Local Search America is free to use and free of advertising. In this article I’m going to walk you through its three tools to find local TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher learning near Portland and search their Web sites. We’ll start with Local News TV.
Putting Together an AI-Free Similar RSS Feed Finder (Featuring WordPress)
Been thinking a lot about RSS lately. I am definitely seeing an uptick in visits to RSSGizmos.com and more blog posts about RSS are showing up in my feed reader. While there are lots of tools out there for keyword-searching RSS feeds, I found myself wanting something to discover RSS feeds with similar content. So […]
Wikipedia Categories + YouTube Channels = TubeTerrain.com
Tube Terrain lets you browse lists of YouTube channels built from Wikipedia categories. Filter by keyword, subscriber count, video count, channel age and more!
A Use Case for TimeCake
People ask me sometimes for “use cases” for the things I make. It’s not something I think about too much — I need something, I create it — but this morning I found something that I think fits well so I wanted to share. Google announced yesterday a new local search app for Windows. When […]
Researching Public Figures in the Epstein Birthday Book, Part I: MiniGladys
MiniGladys is a collection of four Wikipedia-based research tools. In the time it takes for a few clicks and a few reads you can get background on Leon Black, for example, find major news stories linked to him, and discover topics related to him that you might not know about. Here’s how.
QueryAnvil: AI As Search Sidekick Instead of Main Character
I was staring in frustration at the search results when I thought, “I wish I had some way of marking which of these results are useful and which aren’t, and then have an AI analyze the different sets for language use and give me suggestions for how I can revise my search to get more useful stuff and less crap.” Then I thought, “Oh damn, that sounds like a good idea, I should make that.” So I did.
Topical Monitoring Via Wikipedia Categories
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.
An Updated Version of the OPML Peeler
One of the many web sites I’ve scattered everywhere is RSS Gizmos ( https://rssgizmos.com/ ) which has a number of tools for discovering, creating, and using RSS. One of them is OPML Peeler, which takes an OPML file (OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language; an OPML file in this context is basically a bundle […]