News Aggregators
I am still struggling with this technology. It is clear that it can be very helpful. This technology has been around for 4-5 years, but evidently living its life somewhere in the background. I had at least not heard about it and more or less stumbled over it on search for something else. Is there anyone else in the group who is using a News Aggregator to collect biotech information? In such a case, please feel free to provide feeds that you like.
There are a number of agents available. Some are free, some are shareware and some (I guess) are commercial software. I have - without looking too much into the matter - settled for Newz Crawler, a shareware program at a cost of about 25 USD. (I am a registered user by now).
There seems to be certain differences between the different aggregator agents in their capabilities. The area is not as standardized yet as email or news is.
Newz Crawler is able to collect both text-based RSS-feeds (which I am for example using for Medscape) and actual websites.
Today, (which I wanted to write a couple of lines about, as it is so neat), I managed to set up Newz Crawler to do some Google News searches.
Google News is Google's newspaper and magazine search.
news.google.com
This is a very good place to look for company news. If a local company in Seattle has written something about Icos, a search will bring this up. Sometimes it is possible to dig up quite interesting things. The English article I posted to the MLNM-board (about the firing of all the staff and the one month old facility being abandoned) today was the result of such a search.
I have been running these searches using Mozilla Firebird's tabbing feature. It works quite well. I have made a bookmark for each search and when I choose open in tabs (using the Tabbrowser Extensions) they will all come up in the same instance of the program, but each one under a different tab.
The logical thing is however to pull this over into the aggregator. I have been looking for a way to "scrape" the website in order to pull the result of text searches into the aggregator. It should be possible, I guess, but I have not figured out how to do it yet. Suggestions?
But it turned out to be perfectly possible and quite easy to pull in the complete website instead - after the searches have been done. The way to do this is as follows:
1. Do the Google News search you are interested in. A search for Abgenix for example will create the following URL.
news.google.com
2. Create a new folder (for example) in Newz Crawler where these searches can be stored.
3. Create a new webpage channel and put it into the company folder.
4. Paste the URL Google is using (as the one above) into the form in Newz Crawler and name the channel. And that's it.
5. Repeat for all the companies you have an interest in to follow.
I have 18 companies in my company folder. If and when I want to check if there are any news for any one of them, I open the agent, put the cursor over the company folder and hit F5. It will take Newz Crawler 3-4 seconds to update 18 searches. Yes, I am sitting here with a very fast broadband connection. But for those who don't - this can also be done in the background in pre-programmed intervals.
Finally, I can fast and easily scroll down and check for news in each of them. They come sorted by date, so the latest piece is always the uppermost.
All in all, this is an extremely powerful way of keeping a check on what is going on with the companies i have an interest in.
And the best thing is that it should actually be possible to do this with all types of internet searches that one likes to do regularly. SEC's Edgar is of course an obvious candidate.
Using the URL
sec.gov
will bring up the filings of Abgenix. Create a new channel and paste the address into the aggregator and there is a new superfast search straight into Edgar's database.
If I want to be updated on what goes on in the clinics with "my" molecules, I can define a search into Clinical.Trials.gov database in the same way. A search for what Abgenix has ongoing:
clinicaltrials.gov
This is a little bit dangerous however as quite a number of trials are run without the concerned company being registered as a sponsor. The trials may instead be sponsored by NCI, NIH or individual investigators. And those will be missed with the above search. |
