The PubSub Matchbox
"Making the Most of the Matching Engine"

The subscription of the day today is Garret Graff, who was the first blogger to get access to the White House briefing yesterday.

Today is International Women’s Day. What are bloggers writing about?

The PubSub Matchbox is a weblog by Steven M. Cohen, a librarian at PubSub Concepts. It is written with the end user in mind, showing the various ways in which PubSub can work for them.

The weblog will include, but is not necessarily limited to, the following:

1) A daily post to the Subscription of the Day.
2) A “Tip of the Week", usually posted on Fridays.
3) Links to subscriptions created by library staff dealing with hot topics.
4) Posts on newly supported boolean operators and attributes.

If you have any questions or comments about the weblog, please contact Steven at scohen [at] Pubsub [dot] com.

Gnomedex will be held this year in Seattle. If you look at the bottom of the front page, you’ll see a PubSub subscription for the event. The best way to keep track of the event as it unfolds? Why PubSub, of course.

The glitz and glamour of the Oscars were in rare form last night. Here at PubSub headquarters, we were busy counting up the mentions of the nominees over the past 3 weeks in the millions of weblogs, news resources, and press releases (I’ll call them the big three) that we monitor. While the numbers of posts to these media is not a good indicator of how a selective few will choose the “best” in either category, we thought that the numbers were intriguing. The Oscar winners are displayed in red and the highest mentions in blue (if they weren’t the winner).

Motion Picture

The Aviator: 1163
Finding Neverland: 575
Million Dollar Baby: 1437
Ray: 741
Sideways: 1077

Director

Martin Scorsese: 399
Clint Eastwood: 811
Taylor Hackford: 101
Alexander Payne: 127
Mike Leigh: 139

Actor - Leading Role

Don Cheadle: 271
Johnny Depp: 673
Leonardo DiCaprio: 382
Clint Eastwood: 811
Jamie Foxx: 665

Actor - Supporting Role

Alan Alda: 148
Thomas Haden Church: 149
Jamie Foxx: 665
Morgan Freeman: 388
Clive Owen: 257

Actress - Leading Role

Annette Bening: 117
Catalina Sandino Moreno: 100
Imelda Staunton: 167
Kate Winslet: 325
Hilary Swank: 412

Actress - Supporting Role

Cate Blanchett: 261
Laura Linney: 121
Virginia Madsen: 187
Sophie Okonedo: 97
Natalie Portman: 416

3 out of the 6 winners led in mentions in “The Big Three” over the past 3 weeks. Again, this is by no means a scientific endeavor, just a bit of fun unscientific collective intelligence testing.

An aside: Jamie Foxx probably had more mentions in best supporting actor category because we didn’t distinguish it from his portrayal as Ray, in which he won the Oscar for best actor (doing so would have skewed the results). That said, even though Foxx received that award, he didn’t beat out Clint Eastwood and Johnny Depp in mentions in “The Big Three” for that category. Go figure.

This week, the TOW involves the art of making an ego feed with the PubSub matching system.

For those who don’t know, an ego feed involves the creation of a subscription to match your name. Thus, whenever someone mentions you in a weblog post or in the news, you will be notified in real-time. That said, there is more to it than just putting in your name. Here are some pointers.

+ Do you use a middle initial in your name? If so, does everyone use that middle initial when they blog about you?

+ Are there different ways to spell your name? For example, Stephen versus Steve verus Steven. You will want to put in every possible spelling of your name.

+ Does you name often get misspelled? If so, you may want to use the most common misspellings of your name in your ego feed.

+ Sometimes bloggers may link to one of your weblog posts, but not use your name in their post. You may want to utilize the URI attribute, which will match any results that link to any part of the URL. For example, if someone linked to PubSub but didn’t write the word PubSub, then using URI:pusbub.com will still pick it up.

+ For those that have a common name, I also suggest using the URI attribute, but also suggest adding keywords to your ego feed. For example, if Bill Gates was as common as John Smith, it would be beneficial to add keywords such as ‘Microsoft’ or ‘windows’ to the feed, to decrease the number of irrelevant results.

Find out what people are saying about you. Set up an ego feed in PubSub today.

I’m going to try out new segment on the blog. Called “What’s Hot", I’ll link to hot new items in different media outlets (books, DVDs, etc) and create subscriptions around them. I’ll try to do this once every other week and see how it goes.

What’s Hot in DVDs

1) Friends - The Complete 9th Season.

2) The Incredibles

3) Napoleon Dynamite

4) Ray

5) Donnie Darko

6) Sex in the City - Season 6, Part 2

The big news on the Web today is that Paris Hilton’s sidekick (no, not Nicole Richie) was hacked. Follow the thread (some content may not be SFW).

Some other stories and people in the news today:

1) A 6.4 magnitude earthquake shook Iran last night.

2) An American citizen has been charge with conspiring to assassinate president Bush.

3) Supreme Court chief justice William H. Rehnquist will not be present during the initial proceedings at the court, leading to more speculation as to his possible retirement.

The big news in the blogosphere today was the death of Hunter S. Thompson (Subscription of the Day), who committed suicide last night.

In other news, Warner Brothers has updated the Looney Toons. Say hello to Loonatics. Also, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is coming out on the big screen.

In tech news, there is lots of talk about Tansmit 3, a new FTP client for OS X.

More news:

Despite many concerns, Chris Rock will indeed host the Oscars

John Negroponte was tapped by President Bush as the first U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

Doug Wead apparently recorded George W. Bush during conversations when Bush was Governor of Texas. The polibloggers are all over this one.

Did you know that you can order a pizza while playing Everquest 2? I’m talking about directly from the game. Remember how excited we were when Pong came out?

Have you been following all of the talk about Mspace? We have. Well, we watch everything.

The tip of the week focuses on one of the less-known tools that PubSub offers. That of SEC filings. You can be notified via RSS, the sidebar, or e-mail of any filings submitted to the SEC by any public company.

The following parameters can be used: company/subject, CIK code, and form type. You can also limit the results to include or exclude ownership forms (or choose to get only ownership forms).

Who could use this service?

+ Lawyers who want to keep up with forms submitted by potential clients.
+ Companies that want to keep up with filings by competitors or potential business partners.
+ Stockholders in public companies.
+ Stockbrokers who make trades based on SEC filings.

Stay ahead of the business world with SEC filing notificiations with PubSub.