Wednesday, February 19, 2003

RSS-ifying Auctions. ebaytools - eBay2RSS "' nf0's Life: "I just hacked together this little perl script. Its called eBayTools . It will take a list of items, search ebay, and create an RSS feed with the results. Ideally you can set it up as a daily cron job to find your favorite goodies.' Cool! Looks like Josh has been pretty prolific these past couple of days. Can't wait to get a chance to try this little, but useful script." [...useless miscellany] Which begs the question, why can't eBay provide RSS feeds for individual items? Of course, I wouldn't subscribe to any of them until they fix their misguided privacy policies. [The Shifted Librarian] 5:47:59 PM    comment []

Self-dissimilarity in word-frequency identifies hot news. A researcher at Cornell has developed a new technique for automatically identifying emerging trends online -- by measuring average word-distribution-frequencies, he can spot trendy new words as they pop out of the blogosphere. In a simple historical test of the technique, Kleinberg analysed all the annual State of the Union addresses given by US Presidents since 1790. He found that particular word "bursts" could indeed be linked to important events at the time the speeches were delivered. In the years that immediately followed the American Revolution, for example, sudden bursts in the use of words such as "militia", "British" and "savages" are found. From 1930 to 1937 a spike in the use of the word "depression" is seen. And from 1949 to 1959 "atomic" is the word with the greatest "burstiness". Later in the 20th century, words such as "Vietnam", "Soviet", "communist" and "Afghanistan" increase sharply in usage. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 5:41:46 PM    comment []

Into Blogging? If so this is Wicked Cool -- Your Blog Neighborhood. Into Blogging?  If so this is Wicked Cool -- Your Blog Neighborhood Heck ... Its wicked cool even if you aren't.  Recommended.  [_Go_] View My Blog Neighborhood Note: What this is showing you are blogs that you'd probably enjoy reading if you aren't i.e. they are "neighbors" of yours that you might not have been introduced to yet. Congrats to Veer and the rest of the team on this one.  Good job guys.  [The FuzzyBlog!] 5:37:00 PM    comment []