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

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.

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.

I’m going to try something new. Every Friday, I will post a tip on how to best use the PubSub service. Today, I focus on the “URI” attribute.

If you wanted to the engine to match any weblog posts that have a link to an mp3 file in it, just put URI:mp3 in your query. In additon, you can limit the results by putting in some keywords. Thus a query for (podcast | podcasting | podcasted) AND URI:mp3 will match results that have the specific keywords AND have a link to an mp3 file.

If there are any PubSub tips that you would like to share, send us a note.