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Protected: Urodziny 2009

Jun 30th, 2009 by admin

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A review of free web monitoring applications

Sep 19th, 2007 by admin

I performed a quick research on freeware web monitoring applications. By web monitoring application I mean a desktop application offering at least the following functionality:

  1. The user enters a list of web pages to be monitored.
  2. For each web page, the user assigns custom rules that tell what kind of updates she is interested in (eg. all updates, or updates that contain a specific keyword only).
  3. The program runs in the background and alerts the user whenever the suitable update occurs.

Most of the applications I’ve tested were totally unusable, but there are three interesting ones:

If I had to recommend one of them as the best one, I would probably choose Page Update Watcher. Apart from standard features common to all these programs (define checking intervals, various alert methods etc.) it allows for grouping of monitored web pages – functionality essential if you have to track dozens of sites. Another useful feature of this application is the possibility of defining a web page area to be monitored, so that all updates outside of the area are ignored. OutPosted takes a different approach here: it allows you to specify how many changes on a page are required in order to classify the page as updated.

What all these programs miss is the ability of defining custom keywords for each monitored web page. Such feature is necessary if you need to keep track of certain trademarks, or if you are interested in news from a certain domain. So to sum up, if you need to perform non-trivial web monitoring, I’d rather look at commercial solutions.

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Usenet monitoring

Apr 17th, 2007 by admin

The role of Usenet in opinion sharing is not as important as it used to be. Wikipedia’s definition of social media doesn’t even include this medium and I guess that most of today’s Internet users don’t know the term at all.

Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of traffic in Usenet, for example in such groups as pl.misc.telefonia.gsm (Polish newsgroup on GSM telephony) where people infinitely discuss pros and cons of various GSM operators and telephones. Therefore it might be worth considering to monitor selected newsgroups to keep current on product opinions, to protect brand name etc. As Google archives all Usenet postings ever written and makes them searchable, a casual Usenet posting might turn out to be more important than a professional portal article that gets deleted after a week or two.

Two simple methods of Usenet monitoring are Google Alerts and filtered RSS feeds. Google Alerts are straightforward: you just define an alert by providing a search string and e-mail address, then you receive notifications via e-mail. The drawback is that you need to define folders and rules in your e-mail reader to have the information under control. On the other hand, they enable you to search all articles, threads and groups - this is not possible with the RSS method.

The RSS example will assume that a popular and free Feedreader is used, but a similar technique applies to e.g. FeedDemon. In order to monitor the newsgroup comp.sys.laptops for the word Sony, first define the feed corresponding to it. You do so by adding the following addresses to the reader:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.laptops/feed/topics.xml?num=100

Then create a new feed that contains filtered articles from the above feed. In case of Feedreader such filtered feed is called smartfeed (in FeedDemon, use watch to achieve the same result). Create a new smartfeed named Sony on Usenet and define it as the following:

  • [Match all of the following rules]
  • [Title] [contains] [Sony]
  • [Feed name] [is one of the following] [comp.sys.laptops Google Group]

Also, go to Tools / Options and check Open article link automatically. Now, as soon as a new article with the word Sony appears in the newsgroup, it will be displayed inside the smartfeed Sony on Usenet. When you click on the article title the entire thread will be displayed.

The limitation of the RSS approach is that monitored keywords need to appear in the subject or in the beginning part of the first article of a thread. Moreover, it’s not possible to search the entire Usenet. On the other hand, the solution is easier to manage compared to e-mail alerts.

Posted in Information Retrieval, Public Relations, Social Media | No Comments »

Monitoring a news-like website without a RSS feed

Apr 10th, 2007 by admin

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me about an efficient way to monitor an auction website for new tenders. The site didn’t offer a RSS feed so it was not possible just to use a feed reader. This inspired me to perform a quick search on free feed creation tools, ie tools that take a web page and produce a feed out of it.

From the programming point of view a task of implementing a feed creation tool sounds trivial: all that’s needed is to extract links together with their captions from a given page. But the output of the tools I tested was not always perfect: the most common issue was the existence of “garbage” news items that in fact didn’t point to any news. After trying out a few solutions I decided that FeedYes is a good compromise between functionality and ease of use. The user just enters page URL and then can define which items on the page are the news items and which ones are to be ignored – all of this is done just by clicking on them. When the feed is ready, the user obtains its URL and can enter it into any feed reader.

On a side note: As the feed creation service has a fixed Internet address, it can easily be blocked by a website owner that doesn’t accept such way of accessing the site’s content (eg because he lives by ad publishing). However, there is no easy way to block a similar service running directly on the reader’s computer. In fact it is surprising that popular feed readers don’t offer the feed creation functionality; it would not only be more convenient but also impossible to be blocked.

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