March 7, 2002

12:55 PM

The New York Times finally justified asking for my email address: you can specify a list of words and phrases and have the Times email you whenever an article containing one of them appears. (My list: 'aphex, autechre, squarepusher, "warp records"')
posted by lbergstr (17 comments total)

About time. My list is "Formula 1", "Formula One", "Michael Schumacher"
posted by riffola at 1:04 PM on March 7, 2002

lbergstr, your list sounds like what mine might be, so what's the article?
posted by Dean King at 1:14 PM on March 7, 2002

I only signed up today, no articles yet. It may be a while. But if anybody makes even a passing reference (I'm imagining "this chef works with ingredients like Autechre works with a drum beat") I'll catch it.
posted by lbergstr at 1:23 PM on March 7, 2002

brazilian bikini wax
posted by mlang at 1:27 PM on March 7, 2002

world, end, today
posted by yerfatma at 1:48 PM on March 7, 2002

trebuchet coelacanth lactose
posted by mathis23 at 2:00 PM on March 7, 2002

forgive me for my flippancy above; but you do realize that this could also be done via spy on it? you could set up a 'spy' to get notified whenever autechere gets mentioned on nytimes.com, metafilter.com, builder.com.com, or anywhere you like.

another popular 'spy' is the one where you get notified every time google's spider hits the word 'kottke' (i'm not making this up — well, maybe the part about it being a popular 'spy', but it would be very easy to set up if you wanted to do so).

of course the new york times notification thing is probably more assured of working (for their own site), but spy on it is good to know about for other places.
posted by mlang at 2:07 PM on March 7, 2002

They've taken the name of the late, lamented Excite Newstracker, but as that article notes, there are other free services. And it's not clear that it searches wire services -- just "published" Times articles. Still, it is the paper of record, and this is probably useful to a lot of people, especially in politics and business.

spyonit is OK (although the reason I finally gave up on ICQ was that spyonit kept ICQing me about an update -- for which I'd removed the ICQ notification months ago). It doesn't seem especially suited to this application, though -- for one thing, the search terms must appear on an index page. I tried using spyonit to keep tabs on the Evergreen, CO "rebirthing trial" (if you saw Law & Order last night, they riffed on that case), without much success.

A related service that disappeared was Yahoo! News's "state news" panels that you could add to My Yahoo. Whatever their vendor was, they terminated the agreement; after a long time they brought back a similar service around city-based newspapers, but it's not quite the same thing.
posted by dhartung at 2:19 PM on March 7, 2002

this could be great for ego-trips - just put your own name in there and whenever the nytimes writes about you, they email you to let you know.
posted by panopticon at 2:19 PM on March 7, 2002

really?
posted by goneill at 2:21 PM on March 7, 2002

another popular 'spy' is the one where you get notified every time google's spider hits the word 'kottke' (i'm not making this up — well, maybe the part about it being a popular 'spy', but it would be very easy to set up if you wanted to do so).

mlang: how exactly is that done?
posted by monju_bosatsu at 2:37 PM on March 7, 2002

monju, it probably has something to do with PermaSearch or more likely Vanity Spy.
posted by dhartung at 4:53 PM on March 7, 2002

Carson Daly, Horrifying Mishap, and Woodchipper.
posted by dong_resin at 6:23 PM on March 7, 2002

Also:
Olsen Twins, Missing, and White Slave Ring.
posted by dong_resin at 6:25 PM on March 7, 2002

I got an alert, and it has a text ad in it.
posted by riffola at 9:38 PM on March 7, 2002

ah hah ha haa *hack*hack* oh man heh heh
jeezis d_r you are some kinda freak!
posted by Dean King at 9:56 PM on March 7, 2002

dhartung: i did not know that spyonit only hits index pages (although that does make a lot of sense; i wondered how they could possibly crawl sites as deep as metafilter and nytimes daily...for thousands of non-paying subscribers). this new information does render spy on it useless in terms of searching nytimes for a specific word; you are correct.

monju: dhartung was correct in his response to you also; i was talking about the vanity spy for kottke...which, on further examination, relies upon northern light and alta vista, and thus has no connection with google. so i was wrong in one instance and i lied in the second.

and 'brazilian bikini wax' has not yet turned up on nytimes. all around a bad day for me.
posted by mlang at 7:03 AM on March 8, 2002