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

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]

Ask.com, the 4th largest search engine just released a new look and a boat load of features to its results page. ResourceShelf has a nice run down of the new release here and the news has lit up Techmeme as well and here’s a detailed review on Search Engine Land.

First, congratulations to the Ask team for a very very nice product. The user interface is clean yet allows for additional contextual results across media types. This seems to be very useful, especially for well known search terms. Say you are looking for new info on Maroon 5 - you can now get all of the results - Bio, Images, Event Search, Encyclopedia, Lyrics, Popular Tracks and related names, in a very non-intrusive way. In other words, if you want to explore, its all there and if you want to ignore it, it’s not competing for your attention. In particular, the contextual integration with iLike for this use case is very well done. Another broad search test for “Pizza” also showed good results with additional categories such as Business Listings, Shopping, Videos. You get the picture.

My first impression was that the new Ask.com is now as much of a discovery service as it is a search engine. For the example I used above, bringing in data such as events, lyrics and images into the fold means that there even more of a dynamic nature to this than ever before. The interaction design and final destination points across each result type made me realize that instead of fighting other search engines on relevancy of data already indexed on the web, there’s an opportunity to service those users that are searching for information that may not have shown up as yet. A concert, a new song, a new pizza restaurant, what ever. To me, this new design is well suited to this notion.

2 suggestions:

First: Expand the recommendation engine. For example if I did a search for events for Maroon 5 in Boston and there’s no events, show me where they are playing anyway say in a 100 mile radius, along with the no results found.

Second: Michael Fergueson, Ask.com’s user experience guru, does cover some important points about how this design allows for better user retention and repeat visits in this interview with Andy Beal. However, I think Ask might still be closing the interaction loop prematurely. RSS can be an effective tool to continue the engagement with the user beyond the search results page. Since you know I’m interested in a Maroon 5 show in Boston, give me a feed to subscribe to so I can get a heads up about an event in Boston when it gets announced.

Looking forward to using this more when outbound RSS is enabled. That’s when it gets very relevant to our user community.

Nice job!
Sameer

technorati tags:RSS, Search, Discovery, Ask.com, Ask3D, ZapTXT

The RSS-Specifications blog puts together a nice list of RSS resources that can be useful in the context of education. Using podcasts for lectures, sharing bookmarks with other professors, school schedules, student research are a few of the mentions. In particular, the ideas that don’t require RSS knowledge are great - Del.icio.us, Podcasts are straight forward and considered mainstream already. Now on to RSS-related hacks to make education better….

This post reminded me of something I stumbled upon a few weeks ago: Col. Mitchell Paige Middle School is a great example of a educational institution that has actually made great progress on this front. Here’s some press coverage on this. The school publishes a Principals blog, Daily Bulletin, and a Daily Podcast for parents. When I ran this by a few friends that have school age kids, every single one of them was thrilled with the idea of using push mechanisms to reach parents about important stuff and it annoyed them that their kids schools were not getting with the program. That said, all of these friends were from the SF Bay Area and worked in hi-tech so RSS is as mainstream as Email for them, and they all own iPods.

Looking at the list of ideas on the RSS-Specifications blog, this is clearly a step in the right direction and it will work for Col. Paige, a middle school in California. In general however, the execution needs to be considered carefully beyond creating RSS feeds. Most kids and Parents outside of the tech universe are not sitting in front of an RSS reader all day or even know what an RSS reader is. If its something that you need to make sure that they don’t miss or are likely to ignore, push it to a delivery mechanism of their choosing. For students, delivering this important information to “where ever it is” that they hang out is likely the best place to get their attention - Instant Messenger, Email, Facebook, Mobile Phone, etc. I’m not (yet) a parent of a school age kid but I would venture to guess that if it were made convenient for them to receive a homework assignment notification that they had to do anyway on their Facebook page, they might welcome the convenience of not having to check in somewhere else and be happy to friend you. No guarantees that it will be completed on time but you gave them a heads up.
With the recent news of Facebook opening up its platform, I can’t wait for someone to find even more seamless ways to make this a convenience. RSS is a great transport mechanism for content but outside of tech hubs, RSS readers just don’t have the muscle to be considered a killer consumption app for most parents and kids yet. Until then, show up where the party’s at if you want to make sure that the message gets delivered.

technorati tags:RSS, RSS+education, Education, Research, Facebook, ZapTXT

The International Center for Media and Public Agenda released results of a study conducted on the usage and execution of RSS on top news sites.

Summary of findings:

• Biggest Problems: 1. RSS feeds provided by many news sites often don’t publish stories that are not staff-written or produced thereby removing the 24/7 coverage you come to expect from the website version. As important, users don’t always know what exactly is being omitted in the RSS feed. 2. Full feeds not always provided.
• Best Users of RSS: The Los Angeles Times, ABC News, Christian Science Monitor, BBC World Service and Fox News.
• Solution: Regular news consumers may get a more accurate version of Top Stories from Google News [RSS feed / Google News ZapTask]

For other opinions on the study, see Dave Winer, the FP Passport and Libraryola

Coincidently, Robert Scoble also sparked off an interesting discussion on RSS Mistakes a few days ago.

[via]

Happy Zapping, Sameer

technorati tags:RSS, ICMPA, News, MSM, ZapTXT

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

2 very good write ups on RSS in the past few days.

RSS - where it’s been and what possiblities might exist:

Alex Iskold provides a detailed write up on Read/WriteWeb about the future of RSS and breaks down [tag]RSS[/tag] into its core components and the benefits it brings over the “old web”. For those of you trying to get a handle on how RSS came about and became a distribution mechanism and the hurdles it faces going forward, this is really a great read. Alex is not trying to prove a point with this, rather generate a discussion. And discussion he certainly got in the comments!

Alex illustrates the problems inherent in RSS that limit its usage in its current form for say, bank statements. It’s a good one. A point that I would add, as we have consistantly done (and of course we are biased) is that the weakest link to RSS proliferation is the RSS Reader itself. Considering the possibilities of using RSS to syndicate other types of data beyond rss-based content or blogs is important but we have to consider the consumption mechanism that’s appropriate for other syndication scenarios too. Is a suspicious withdrawl from your bank account really only as important as the headlines of the day from CNN? If not, then it shouldn’t be burried with your other 100 unread posts in your reader.

RSS on Steroids - what you can do with RSS well beyond written content

Marshall at SplashCast Media writes up a thoroughly researched RSS Usage Manual. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you want a fresh perspective on how to squeeze more out of RSS, re-cast your methods to reach new audiences, or you’re just bored with static usage of RSS for just blogs and other RSS-based written content, this one is for you. He covers approaches and tools for mixing and ’splicing’ feeds (e.g. FeedRinse) and filtered IM, SMS, Email notifications (e.g ZapTXT) and giving legs to your video, audio and written content by the use of syndication features that SplashCast offers. He tells a good story that’s peppered with real usage scenarios for folks from different walks of life. Give it a look-see.

Cheers, Sameer

We just formally announced ourselves to the world and released a new set of features.

Here’s a run-down of whats new in this release:

1. Publisher widgets: If you publish content that is RSS-enabled, please check this out. You’ll see how we can help you drive traffic, inform your editorial strategy and generate better ad revenue.

Here’s where you can find the the what’s, why’s and how’s.

2. Receive your alerts as a custom RSS feeds: If you like ZapTXT’s monitoring features but prefer using a traditional RSS reader to receive ZapTXT alerts, you can now do that.

In addition to traditional RSS Readers, if you live within a start page such as Netvibes, here’s what it would look like. All your information still on your start page. Cool?

3. Share your ZapTasks: You can now share a ZapTask that you created with friends and colleagues. So if you labored over building an air tight list of feeds to monitor say a competitor, a gadget, a drug, simply hit share and fire it off to someone. Of course you could also export as an OPML file if you like.

4: Top Searches: Don’t know what feeds to use for a ZapTask you would like to create? We now let you see feeds in the ZapTXT ecosystem, by search term. Some of you found that leveraging the collective intelligence in this way to be a useful approach. So here you go!

Eduard, Xavier, Jane get all the credit for making this happen on the development and production side. Finally, here’s the announcement that went out. For that, a big thanks to Tim for all his hard work and diligence.

Questions? We have answers.

Fire away in the comments section below or drop us a line at support [at] zaptxt-inc.com.