A month ago we started to see a surge in Nintendo’s Wii tracking using ZapTXT. So we thought we’d share, in case there were some Wii-heads out there desperately seeking one for the holidays.

An awesome utility to track Wii availability is Wii Tracker. WiiTracker tracks Wii availability at major retailers such as Amazon, Buy.com, CircuitCity, Costco.com, eToys.com, Sears, Target.com, Frys.com, and Walmart.com and provides updates on availability for each of these retailers. What’s cool is that you can click straight through from WiiTracker’s site or from the ZapTXT alert to the shopping cart for each of these retailers.
WiiTracker has an RSS feed that you can use to subscribe to all updates via an RSS reader. Or you can use ZapTXT to receive notifications via IM, Skype, Email or SMS, only when WiiTracker finds new inventory at any of the retailers its tracks.

Use this link to use ZapTXT to monitor the Wii and you’ll be on your way. Important: Remember to use our keyword monitoring feature with the phrase “in-stock” to only receive notifications when the site detects available units.

Happy shopping, Sameer

Allan Hoffman wrote an article on NJ.com called “IF U R KEWL U CAN TXT (Translation: If you are cool, you can text)” that talks about how texting is breaking into mainstream usage, well beyond the youth and early adopter crowd.

ZapTXT was included in the article as an example of how to monitor topics of interests on sites you read via IM, Email and SMS.

“ZAPtxt (www.zaptxt.com) will monitor Web sites based on keywords of your choice. You could choose to monitor a sports Web site for your team or a business site for a company; when new information appears about your keyword, you’re notified with a text message. As with a number of other services, you can also opt to receive alerts via e-mail or instant message.”

NJ.com provides news, business and sports updates from Newark Star-Ledger, The Times, Trenton, The Jersey Journal, Easton Express-Times, Bridgeton News and Today’s Sunbeam.

A big welcome to all the folks from NJ local communities that came by to check out ZapTXT. Our NJ debut was on Hoboken411, a blog focused on Hoboken, NJ where we are proud to power notifications for new posts and comments via IM, Email or Mobile Device.

Thanks for the mention Allan!

Cheers, Sameer

technorati tags:Nj.com, zaptxt, Hoboken411, Allan+Hoffman

Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs fame announced the release of a nifty application she built for PodHandle that presents content (using RSS feeds) from over 50 podcasting professional consultants and relevant Google Blog Search queries. The application is designed to benefit those in the podcasting consulting business by making available a searchable list of podcasting related resources.

Instead of just publishing a list of feeds (or OPML for the more technically minded), Marjolein chose to build an application using Grazr which enables effective feed management, browsing and searching. Marjolein has graciously shared the process of creating this application for the benefit of others looking to do something similar to what she has done for Podcasters.

Paul and I had the opportunity to work with Marjolein on this to get ZapTXT integrated into application and as always, it’s great working with her.

Congratulations to Marjolein on a successful release. I’m sure we will be seeing more of these very soon.
Cheers, Sameer

technorati tags:Marjolein+Hoekstra, CleverClogs, ZapTXT, RSS, Grazr, Podcasts, Podcasting, Podhandle

Sean Heber of SpiffyTech has a cool service called Totally Scored that lets you search for sports scores and subscribe to results via RSS. It’s a straight forward service: pick your team(s) or sports and view score results. Optionally, subscribe to RSS feeds for future results if you like.

For those of you that need to receive sports scores asap, ZapTXT is available on the site on every search result page so you can subscribe for notifications via IM, Skype, Email or SMS. Search the site for your favorite sport or team and on the results page, click on the green button at the bottom. You’ll be taken to ZapTXT to pick your alert preferences and thats it.

Here’s a screen shot of a ZapTXT alert via Skype for the Milwaukee Pittsburgh game below. I used Skype but you can use Email, SMS or your favorite IM client.

Go to Totally Scored to get started!

technorati tags:ZapTXT, RSS, Sports+Scores, Totally+Scored, Sports

Consumer Reports, one of the most trusted sources when it comes to news and product ratings and buying guides now provides RSS feeds. Partnering with SimpleFeed, the site lets you combine feeds for specific topics (cars, home, babies, latest news etc.) to create a master feed that covers topics that you are interested in. Its a nice approach to building a sub domain of topics from a larger bucket of information so you have just one tailored feed from a given source.

Consumer reports provides a host of information within the feed, including relevant articles (nice touch!) and a link back to the site to get the ‘war and peace’ version.

One suggestion that I would make to them is to allow users to name this customized feed. All combinations of feeds are labeled as “Consumer Reports”. It might be hard to remember what feeds I have in my combo menu, a few months down the line.

To see how this feed serving capability performs in combination with our filtering and notification abilities, I’ve set up a ZapTask with the Consumer Reports feed for Babies and asked to be notified via IM when there’s a mention of “Britax” - the car seat that my 16 month old lounges in. The feed validated just fine so I don’t see why I shouldn’t be getting an alert one of these days.

All in all, RSS just makes a boat load of sense for the type of content that Consumer Reports serves up and the implementation is dead simple requiring little or no RSS know-how. Congrats to the Consumer Reports team on joining the RSS bandwagon.

[via RSS Blog]

[tags]Consumer+Reports, RSS, ZapTXT, Britax, SimpleFeed[/tags]

Cheers
Sameer

A lot has been written about how to discover new blogs and websites using RSS. The most common approach to this is subscribing to search results RSS feeds from blog search engines or RSS feeds provided by memes, and participatory media sites. And services such as Sphere are just great to discover related content and writers in the context of an article that you are reading.

Lately, we’ve seen a lot of interesting uses of ZapTXT to monitor topics of interest from sources other than written web content. This post tries to shed some light on 4 places, to find hidden influencers, and thought leaders, that might be too deep or out of scope for a blog search engine to catch. Give it a try - I found a couple of ZapTXT mentions that I wasn’t aware of.

Presentations/Slides/Documents
The value of RSS in this space is not getting nearly enough attention. Sites such as SlideShare (review), and Scribd (review) provide RSS feeds so you can track topics of interest mentioned within presentations or documents hosted by these sites. There’s a sea of content from credible authors in this maze that may or may not be referenced in blogs or other written sources. Some of these folks are well respected conference speakers and thought leaders that have good things to say. What’s particularly unique about this is that the search results show reflect content inside a presentation (as opposed to just metadata). More and more conference speaker slides and company presentations are hosted on these sites as a way to achieve more shelf life beyond the speaking event, product launch or training session.

PodCasts or Video Casts
Monitor topics and content within the audio or video file. Say an industry expert was interviewed in a podcast or videocast. Believe it or not, many such experts don’t have blogs or write for a living. They do however have insightful stuff to say and they may even mention your company, industry, whatever. Using RSS feeds provided by services such as EveryZing, Blinkx (reviews), and Adap.tv (review) will allow you to monitor not just tags (as you would with YouTube) but the actual transcript of the interview. So the next time you want to know when Jim Cramer talked about Apple or the Housing Market in an interview, use the RSS feed from one of these services to be notified.

Images and Photos
Did someone post an image of your new product that makes it shine? Photo sharing sites such as Flickr offer RSS feeds for a tag or search result, making it easy to monitor any new images on a given category. Unlike the previous examples above, unfortunately we can’t tell what’s inside the image and have to rely on labels and tags for feeds. Hopefully one day Riya will offer RSS results for searches for a similar watch, pair of shoes, shades, etc. as they do with Like.com. That’s when this is going to get very exciting!

Sites that don’t support RSS.
Believe it or not, there are quite a few of those. Fear not, social bookmarking sites such as De.licio.us, Diigo and StumbleUpon are good resources to find such sites. Just monitor an RSS feed for a tag or a search result and if someone found such a site worthy enough to be shared, you will find it.

More work needs to be done but there’s a lot of goodness hidden in these critters that just don’t get the ink they deserve. A couple of months ago, one of our users was kind enough to let us know that we were profiled up in a newsletter aimed at technologists in the legal industry. None of the above mentioned tricks helped us get wind of that.

Dig deep - there’s a lot of good stuff tucked away.

Cheers, Sameer

[tags]RSS, Conference+Speakers, Training, PodZinger, Sphere, SlideShare, Scribd, De.licio.us, StumbleUpon, Diigo, Riya, Jim+Cramer, Blinkx, Adap.tv, ZapTXT, Podcasts, VideoCasts, Flickr, Alerts[/tags]

Amazon has just announced its intention to provide RSS feeds for Consumer tags.

Tags are a way for you, the Amazon customer, to categorize and find items within the Amazon retail ecosystem. This provides an alternative way to sort your items and for others to find items based on how the user community at Amazon chooses to organize goods and services.

This announcement seems like a very early teaser but they do promise to roll this out over the coming weeks. I’ve tried several tags but no RSS feeds show up yet. In any case here’s how it would work:

Say you are interested in discovering new electronics that support Blu-ray Discs, you could monitor the RSS feed that is generated for all items tagged as Blu-ray and display it on your site or consume it via an RSS reader. If you use ZapTXT, you can filter this Blu-ray RSS feed for specific topics such as Hitachi (if you only want Hitachi products that support Blu-Ray), or ‘Kung-Fu Hustle” (if you want the Blu-Ray version of the DVD) and use the delivery mechanism of your choice (IM, Skype, Email or Mobile) to recieve an alert when we find a match.

Once Amazon releases this functionality on the website in a more prominent fashion, I will update this post with more details on where to find the feeds for tags.

Note to Team Amazon: extend RSS support to search results (get an RSS feed for a product or any search you do on Amazon, similar to what eBay does).

Ian McAllister has a details on the program here if you’d like to know more. [Via]

Happy Zapping,Sameer

technorati tags:Amazon, RSS, ZapTXT, Retail, RSS+Commerce

Well, we don’t need a lawyer (we have one!) but we recently found out that the legal community needs us.

ZapTXT was profiled in a recent TechnoLawyer newsletter to law professionals in an article titled: “Bring order to the E-discovery chaos - and other hot products.”

Dennis Kennedy writes a detailed analysis of ZapTXT. Here’s an excerpt:

“You can use tags and search tools to refine the information you want. For example, you can set up a “Zaptask” with key words related to your practice and receive alerts when developments occur in those areas. You might monitor when clients get mentioned in the news or an expert is quoted. Of course, you can also monitor sports teams, shopping bargains, and job openings.

You are not limited to RSS feed material from single sites. You monitor topics or tasks, not just a single site. You can even specify the sites that make up the feed universe you monitor, expanding or contracting that universe as you wish.

ZapTXT is easy to use. Enter your keywords, including Boolean operators, enter the feed information, choose how you want to be alerted and the frequency of updates, and give your task a title and tags. You can then review and sort your Zaptasks in a variety of useful ways.”

TechnoLawyer describes its mission as “Our sole job consists of creating and maintaining an environment in which legal professionals and others in the field can share their knowledge and experiences with their peers.” The series of available newsletters is a great resource for legal professionals trying to make sense of technology as it applies to law and the daunting word of RSS and web based research tools. Neat stuff.

TechnoLawyer is owned by PeerViews Inc., a privately-held online media company in New York City.

Thanks for the detailed write up Dennis! We appreciate it.

technorati tags:ZapTXT, Legal, Law, Productivity, Research

We recently re-casted the Jobs category under Quick ZapTasks on the right side of main console. Our list of feeds, whilst somewhat arbitrary did have some method to the madness. They present a list of feeds from the leading technology/Web 2.0/New Media blogs that have started offering job boards with RSS feeds.

Update: We just added the LifeHacker Job Board Feed to this list as well. The ZapTask link below also has been updated.

For those that are wondering what the utility is of a specialty job board, here’s a good post I came across, written by Paul Stamatiou.

Here’s the (updated) list:

• 37 Signals
• Crunchboard (TechCrunch)
• Guy Kawasaki Job Site
• Joel On Software
• PaidContent
• ProBlogger
• Read/WriteWeb
• Slashdot
• TechGigger
• VentureBeat
• LifeHacker

Here’s what a sample ZapTXT alert looks like for a Flash designer posting on LifeHacker:

Unfortunately, some job boards offered by a few of the well-known blogs do not have well formed feeds but we have many of the good ones here.

To get started

• On ZapTXT.com, go to the Jobs section under Quick ZapTasks,
  check off the job boards that you want to monitor, filter listings if
  you like (e.g. Designer, Marketing, etc), and pick your delivery
  preferences. Thats it. Move on with your life, we’ll alert when we
  find a match.

OR

• Or if you want to monitor the whole list above, use this shared ZapTask for Jobs that has all of the feeds bundled up as one. For those of you so inclined, you can even export this as OPML if you like, to take it to your reader after you set it up. Just click on the Export link on your MyZapTasks page.

Drop us a line in the comments section below if you think we omitted any good ones.

Happy Zapping, Sameer

technorati tags:Jobs, ZapTXT, JobBoards, Job+Boards, Specialty+JobBoards, RSS+Jobs, RSS

There’s been quality commentary about local journalism and citizen journalism lately due to the difficult (but hopefully not insurmountable) developments at BackFence. I was drawn to this story by Mathew Ingram’s post that kindled good discussion amongst experts, one of which I certainly am NOT!

What I do know is that from a consumer perspective, hyper local blogging works. We are proud and grateful to be powering notifications via IM, Email and SMS for a very vibrant local community called Hoboken411.com (they were nice enough to post about ZapTXT here) that has many of the qualities that Mathew alludes to in this quote: “I would agree with Frank that in order to draw people in, a local site has to live and breathe the area it covers, and have lively personalities and content.”

Hoboken411.com services the Hoboken community with blow by blow, almost real time commentary on News, Events, Reviews, Accidents and Recreation, getting north of 50 comments on many many posts. Sample this post that generated over 350 comments that any blogger or publisher would be envious of.

I for one really want local journalism to work. Backfence sent me invaluable information about a shooting one day when I was at work and my wife and 11-month old son were at home, blocks away from an incident that took place in our nieghbourhood. I have received many other useful posts coming straight from the police and fire department via BackFence.

This stuff works for consumers folks. Please find a way to make it work for the bottom line too.

Happy Zapping, Sameer