F
Fabrice Cavarretta
I would be very curious to record automatically the presence on the
net (links!) for all the contacts in my address book.
I believe that can be programmed easily in VB by calling the Google
API, so could easily be an add-in of Outlook. However, if another
easy technology does it, I am open to it (Access?)
That could be done by calling regularly onto a search
engine(Google?), get all links, notice new ones, and store them in the
contact manager as attribute of the contact (in the journal for
instance). Then it is easy to:
1) display when there is new entry ("you have news about a friend"!)
2) identify the pattern of entry over time ("someone got famous around
that time")
3) figure out who is the network of who by just looking at common
links ("so and so appear on the same page, they must be related"!)
We could also make the data collection more general by scrapping, so
then not being tied to Google APIs. For instance in Perl, all
libraries are already written, but then interfacing with VB is a bit
trickier.
Does anyone have seen anything like that? It is a bit
likegooglealert.com, except that the alert engine is not a service on
a web but running locally on one's machine, it is a recurring task
that store the result on a local database (for instance the address
book in Outlook).
Thanks a lot if you have any suggestion!
Fabrice Cavarretta
net (links!) for all the contacts in my address book.
I believe that can be programmed easily in VB by calling the Google
API, so could easily be an add-in of Outlook. However, if another
easy technology does it, I am open to it (Access?)
That could be done by calling regularly onto a search
engine(Google?), get all links, notice new ones, and store them in the
contact manager as attribute of the contact (in the journal for
instance). Then it is easy to:
1) display when there is new entry ("you have news about a friend"!)
2) identify the pattern of entry over time ("someone got famous around
that time")
3) figure out who is the network of who by just looking at common
links ("so and so appear on the same page, they must be related"!)
We could also make the data collection more general by scrapping, so
then not being tied to Google APIs. For instance in Perl, all
libraries are already written, but then interfacing with VB is a bit
trickier.
Does anyone have seen anything like that? It is a bit
likegooglealert.com, except that the alert engine is not a service on
a web but running locally on one's machine, it is a recurring task
that store the result on a local database (for instance the address
book in Outlook).
Thanks a lot if you have any suggestion!
Fabrice Cavarretta