New feature: drilldown tag clouds

Dec 202011

We just modified the tag clouds on our “recent” view.  Now, keywords in a tag cloud can be combined.  This enables more effective drilldown, particularly for large amounts of news on a topic.

For instance, if you select “Google” as a keyword in a topic profile with technology blogs, the number of remaining news tends to be quite large.  You can see this here:

http://mergeflow.net/profiles/news/tech_blogs/recent?mk=Google

When you visit this link, you see a tag cloud that is generated for all science and technology news tagged with the keyword “Google” (usually a fairly large number of news).  You can now drill down by selecting further keywords.  All keywords you select act as AND-filters.  The following link, for example, shows news from the same topic profile (technology blogs) tagged with “Google” and “open source” (of course, there might be no news in this view, depending on news flow on these topics):

http://mergeflow.net/profiles/news/tech_blogs/recent?mk=Google%7Copen%20source

You can also remove any of the selected keywords.  For example, the link below shows what you get when you remove the keyword “Google” (i.e. news from technology blogs tagged with “open source”):

http://mergeflow.net/profiles/news/tech_blogs/recent?mk=open%20source

We hope you find these new tag clouds useful.  Depending on how well these tag clouds work for our users, we might replace the existing tag clouds elsewhere in mergeflow.stream by these drilldown tag clouds as well.

New feature: interactive world map

Oct 212011

We upgraded our “Countries” view.  It now includes an interactive world map (we use a component from ammap).  Below is an example screenshot of the world map, showing news on Kenyan forces entering Somalia (the reports are from US daily news):

Here you can explore this view yourself: http://mergeflow.net/profiles/news/news_us/countries (click “show distribution on world map”).

Here are more examples of interactive world maps:

-news from the World Bank:

http://mergeflow.net/profiles/demo/world_bank_news_by_region/countries

-news from and on the World Health Organization (WHO):

http://mergeflow.net/profiles/Demo_%28English%29/who/countries

-news from German political blogs (in German):

http://mergeflow.net/profiles/Demo_%28deutsch%29/politikblogs/countries

New feature: how to block sites

Sep 302011

Imagine you have subscribed to a search feed on a topic that interests you (for general information on search feeds, see this blog entry here).  Sometimes search feeds deliver interesting information on the whole but also some information that is not relevant.  In many cases, irrelevant information keeps coming from one or a few sites (e.g. PR sites).  In such a situation it would be nice if you could keep the search feed (because in general it does deliver relevant information) but block the site that keeps delivering irrelevant material.

We added a new feature to mergeflow.stream that allows you to do that.  When you are logged in to your account and go to the “web sites” tab of a topic profile, you will see this icon next to each host: Just click on this symbol to block a site.  This symbol is also available in the “site” popup window that can be opened by clicking on this symbol next to a document.

In order to de-block a site, just go to the “manage” view of a topic profile and edit the “blocked sites” list.

Notice that in order to be able to use this feature, you have to be logged in to your mergeflow.stream account, and you have to be the owner of the topic profile.

Accessing mergeflow.stream from other applications

Sep 222011

mergeflow.stream can not only be used via browser, but also via RestAPI (cf. this Wikipedia article).  The RestAPI enables other applications to access mergeflow.stream. This allows mergeflow users to create mashups (cf. this Wikipedia article), or to integrate mergeflow.stream into local applications.

Documentation for the mergeflow RestAPI is available in the “downloads” section of our web page.  For a direct link to the documentation PDF, click here.

 

mergeflow.stream -- new features

Aug 012011

Our latest release of mergeflow.stream has several new features.  Apart from a redesign of the start page (http://mergeflow.net), the most important updates are:

(1) help on mergeflow.stream features

In our latest release we have added online help (English and German).  It is available from anywhere within mergeflow.stream if you click on “help” in the menu bar.

(2) “countries” tab

For some of your topic profiles, it might be relevant to know where events take place.  In order to see this, we have added a new experimental feature, the “countries” tab.  The countries tab is described in our new online help, at http://mergeflow.net/Home/Help#countries.  As described in our online help, you can activate the countries tab through the “manage” view of your topic profiles.

3) user settings

You can get to user settings by clicking on the icon right next to “log out” in the upper right corner:

Among other things, user settings let you change your screen name (“full name”) or your preferred language.  You can also change your password there.

(4) duplicates grouping

Sometimes, two or more feeds in a topic profile deliver exactly the same document more than once.  For instance, a document reported by  the “economics” part of an online news portal could also be reported by the “top news” part of the same portal.  With our new release, we group such duplicates together.  You can reach duplicates of a news item by clicking on the ‘[+]‘ next to the URL (the [+] is only shown if there are duplicates), as shown in the example below:

As always, we look forward to hearing from you.  In particular, we would appreciate your feedback on the “countries” tab since this feature is still a bit experimental.

Public topic profiles

Jul 082011

Perhaps some of you have noticed this already — at…

http://mergeflow.net/Home/PublicProfiles

…we have collected a number of publicly available topic profiles.  So, even if you do not (yet) have a mergeflow.stream account, you can check out these topic profiles to get a first glimpse at what mergeflow.stream does.

We grouped the topic profiles by areas of interest, e.g. news and analysis, technology, or sports.

Also, since some topic profiles are in German and some are in English, you can select German-only or English-only topic profiles as well.

If you have an idea for a topic profile you would like to see, please let us know.  Also, we will add new public topic profiles from time to time.  When we do that, we will let you know here, at our blog.

Topic radar feeds

Jun 142011

Recently we wrote about a new mergeflow feature, the topic radar.  Until now, in order to see if a topic radar has found new information, you had to go check the topic radar (e.g. by going to the “Topic Radar” tab of your dashboard and then looking through the topic radar popups).

In our most recent mergeflow update, we provided topic radars with feeds.  This makes using topic radars even more convenient.  Now, instead of manually looking for new information in your topic radars, you can subscribe to their feeds.  Topic radar feeds provide all the information found by a topic radar.  So if you subscribe to a topic radar feed, you get all the information found by a topic radar delivered to you.

In order to subscribe to a topic radar feed, go to the “Topic Radar” tab of your dashboard.  There you can subscribe to individual topic radar feeds by copying the feed icon link into your feed reader.  The feed icon is the orange icon next to each topic radar title, as shown in the screenshot below:

Instead of using feed icon links, you can also use the feed icon in your browser to list available topic radar feeds (cf. our blog entry on how to get back the feed icon in your browser).

You can either subscribe to individual topic radar feeds or to a summary feed.  The summary feed delivers all new items from all your topic radars in one feed.  It is located in the sidebar of the “Topic Radars” dashboard tab:

You can subscribe to topic radar feeds using your favorite feed reader.  There are browser-based feed readers such as Google Reader, desktop-based readers such as Outlook, or smartphone- or tablet-based readers such as Pulse, cf. the screenshot below:

Of course, you can also add a feed to any mashup that can read feeds.  YahooPipes is one such mashup.  Another, more recent, mashup is called “if this then that”.  “Ifttt” even lets you set up SMS or phone calls (“if a mergeflow topic radar finds something new then send me an SMS or call me”).  If you find any other mashups that you find useful in this context, please let us know!

 

How to create a new topic profile in 5 minutes

Jun 012011

Are you new to mergeflow.stream?  Here we show you how easy it is to set up a new topic profile.

Assume you are interested in news from selected technology blogs.  Perhaps you already have a set of blogs in mind, or perhaps you went to a service like technorati, ctrlq, or blekko to find your technology blogs.

We took a stopwatch to verify that one can in fact set up a new topic profile with a few feeds in under 5 minutes.  Here are the steps we took:

START

Log in to your mergeflow.stream account — 20 seconds (time total = 20 seconds):

Go to “Manage” — 5 seconds (time total = 25 seconds):

Add profile (enter a name for the topic profile, and, if you like, add a description) — 30 seconds (time total = 55 seconds):

Add a feed:

We added eight feeds for starters.  This took 8 x 25 = 200 seconds.

FINISHED!

So we took a total of 255 seconds = 4 minutes, 15 seconds.  Done!  Now mergeflow.stream does the rest.

Here you can see the topic profile we just created: http://mergeflow.net/profiles/news/tech_blogs .  If you have a mergeflow account, you can add this profile to your dashboard, or clone it and add more feeds to it.

 

Source feeds vs. search feeds

May 272011

Web feeds are an established technology for capturing information streams on the internet (but not only on the internet; they work for intranets too, and one can even set up web feeds for file systems).  Because web feeds are such an established technology for capturing information streams, we use them in our software.  However, we often get questions as to how web feeds work or what one can do with them.  One thing we get asked a lot is along the lines of “do I have to know the source in order to get a web feed?  Or can I get a web feed for a certain topic, even if I do not know a good source?” The answer is that you can do both:

If you know the source and are interested in everything that comes from this source, you can use source feeds.  For instance, if you are interested in all the information from a certain blog, paper, company or other source, you can add the feed(s) of this source to one of your mergeflow topic profiles. Of course, our blog has a feed too: Entries (RSS).

On the other hand, if you are interested in a certain topic but do not know a good source for this topic, you can use search feeds and add them to any mergeflow topic profile. Almost all major search engines offer search feeds; sometimes they are called “alert”. You can set up search feeds for any search query. If you do this, as soon as the search engine (rather, its crawler) finds new content pertaining to your query, the search feed delivers this information.

By the way, since search feeds deliver not only the information but also its source, using search feeds can be a good way of spotting good sources.  Here is how this works:

  • Start with one or more search feeds and occasionally check the “web sites”-view of your mergeflow topic profile.  The “web sites”-view is an aggregated view of the information sources in your topic profile. This makes it easy to spot particularly relevant sources (e.g. those that deliver a lot of material that you find interesting).
  • Then, if you like, you can go to these sources directly and add their source feed(s) to your mergeflow topic profile.  The advantage of adding the source directly is that this way you get all the information from this source, not just the material pertaining to your search feed query (which might be too narrow).

Now, just try it out and add a few source or search feeds to your topic profiles, or create new topic profiles.  Please let us know about your experience, and please let us know if you have any questions.  Have fun!

 

"Topic radar" -- a new mergeflow.stream functionality

May 252011

We always work on improving our software.  Some of this work happens “under the hood”, and some of it results in new functionalities.  One of these new functionalities is the “topic radar”. A topic radar allows you to zoom in on a particular topic.

Consider the following scenario: you have a general interest in science and technology news. Accordingly you have set up a mergeflow topic profile with relevant feeds (from journals, blogs, portals, papers, etc.). You can use the “recent”-view to see what is new, the “past”-view to see what was important during the last few days, or the “feeds”-view to see what topics are delivered by what individual information stream.

However, if for example you have a particular interest in news on spacecraft, so far you could only (1) scan through all of your “science and technology” topic profile to find spacecraft-related news, or (2) create a new topic profile particularly on spacecraft news.  Option (1) is a lot of work; for option (2) it may be difficult to find dedicated information streams, and you would miss out on spacecraft news in more general information streams.  Not to mention that with this approach you would eventually end up with a large number of topic profiles, which is not effective.

The topic radar addresses this issue (please note that in order to use topic profiles you have to be logged in to your mergeflow account).  Imagine you find the following article on a new spacecraft in your general “science and technology” topic profile:

Now click on the “document context” icon right next to the title.  Then, in the document context popup, click on the little round icon in the upper right:

Now, in the topic radar window, enter a name for your topic radar (e.g. “spacecraft for deep space missions”), click on “create”, and you are done:

You have just created a topic radar which from now on collects news related to deep space mission spacecraft that appear within your general “science and technology” topic profile.

You can also fine-tune your topic radar by adding more documents to it.  Adding more documents helps the topic radar “learn” what exactly you are interested in.  In order to add a document to a topic radar, go to the document context popup of this document, and click on the topic radar icon.  Then select the topic radar to which you want to add the document (in case you have several topic radars), and click on “add”:

Right now the topic radar also contains some experimental features.  For instance, you can specifically edit the keywords of a topic radar or the relevance threshold of a topic radar.  In order to do this, go to the “topic radars” view of your topic profile, and click on the “edit topic radar” icon to open this popup:

In this window, simply play around a bit, e.g. by trying different relevance thresholds or even adding new keywords, to see the effect of your changes.

We look forward to hearing from you about your experience with the topic radar.  Of course, we can also help with “fine-tuning” or with setting up topic radars in general.  This also provides us an opportunity to learn how we can further improve this new feature.  For example, we are considering an active alerting function (e.g. by email) to alert the user whenever there are new, particularly relevant articles in a topic radar.

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