Alertpedia.com Blog

My kids love Dora and Diego. And, who doesn’t like a yard sale in the neighborhood, or a Eric Clapton concert? The only problem is that I don’t have time to keep checking when Dora is coming to town or when someone decides to share their “junk” with the rest of the community this weekend.

Alertpedia to the rescue! You can now receive alerts on local events  in any area of your choice, for free. For example,

• Tell me when there is a “Dora” event in “New York, NY”.
• Tell me when “Clapton” plays in “Austin, TX”.
• Tell me when there is a “yard sale” in “Ann Arbor, MI”.

You will get alerts for yard sales in Ann Arbor and some miles around it. So, even if you don’t find your exact town in the location dropdown, pick a nearby city and you should be good. If that doesn’t suffice, let us know and we will gladly add your wonderful town to the list.

Hope your weekends are filled with some more fun! And be sure to let us know how you like these alerts or if you want to see something more. As with any good thing in life, please share this  news with your friends.

- Dharani

How often do we check career sites looking for that dream job in our dream location? (and then reality checks in and the current boss walks in with a project plan. ) The good news is that there are dozens of those perfect jobs out there for each of us. But they disappear while we have our heads deep in the current job. Like the mighty mouse discovered in  “Who Moved My Cheese” don’t stop looking for a job even when the current one seems very secure, especially when the economy is turbulent.

Well, here’s how you can have your current job and not miss the dream job too. Alertpedia now supports job alerts by area and category!

e.g., Alert me when there is a “Healthcare” job in “Chicago, IL”

You can filter the alerts on search text:

• e.g., Alert me when there is a “Healthcare” job in “Chicago, IL” with the keyword “nurse” in the title
• Alert me when there is a “Software developer” job in “Austin, TX”, with the keyword “AJAX” in the title

Set up as many as you need. It’s free. Watch them daily or weekly. Be sure to let us know if something is missing from the feature, like your favorite job category.

PS: And good luck with finding your dream job! Drop us a note if you found something useful via Alertpedia alerts. We like to believe that we are making a difference!

While you are in the job hunting mode, here’s another good book to find your dream job: What Color is Your Parachute?.

-Dharani

Fellow Moms-of-the-world,

Alertpedia is my 2nd project, the first being bringing up my kids. There is a selfish motive in running Alertpedia (no, not the Google ads, no one clicks on them ever!) - safety, health, and savings for my own family! And, of course, since one thing we moms are constantly short of is TIME, it’s better that someone else (Alertpedia) takes care of this while I can do other fun things (like signing up our kids for MORE activities )

So, here’re some alerts I set up on towards my own needs:

Safety & Health of my family:

• Product and food recalls (for: “lead” “peanuts” “allergies” etc.)
• Health and Fitness (tell me when there’s some news about asthma, avian flu, allergies, exercise tips, or a new diet guru telling us how cholesterol is actually good for us ;))
• Severe Weather (tell me when there’s a thunderstorm warning or another snow-shoveling day coming up for my area)

Save some money:

• House prices in my area (Tell me when a house goes on sale in my zip code so I know how much I really have with the house. Tell me what houses are selling for in California these days so I can stop all this california dreamin’.)
• Craigslist - (tell me when someone posts a Wii for sale in the tri-state area Craigslist. Tell me when a nanny or a web designer is affordable in the area. )
• Air fare deals (tell me when there’s a sale on flight from Newark to Honolulu so I can start packing for aloha land!)

Stay informed:

• Traffic (tell me if there’s bad traffic on I-695 during my commute hours so I can take Route-47 and get stuck in the congestion there, instead )
• News (tell me when my kid’s school or my hometown or “soccermom” comes in the new)

I don’t personally have alerts set up on Earthquakes because I don’t live in California.. hmmm but earthquakes can occur anywhere (except on the moon, they have moonquakes there), so may be I should set one up just in case !
Hope that helps,

Dharani
Alertpedia: Looking out for you moms

Folks,

We started Alertpedia in the beginning with a very simple goal: alert us about product recalls and earthquakes. Over time it has grown to include many more categories that improve the safety and savings of everyone, while saving time from repeatedly monitoring websites.

Well.. choices lead to questions, and questions lead to a blog post such as this

Question: What are some example alerts I can use Alertpedia for? 

Answer:

• House prices in a zip code (e.g., tell me when a 3-bd room house goes on sale in my zip code for 600k-800k)
• Craigslist - things on sale, jobs in your area (tell me when someone posts a Wii for sale in Philadelphia on Craigslist; tell me when someone needs a web designer in NYC)  
• Product and food recalls (tell me when there is a toy recall due to lead, food recalled due to peanuts)
• Air fare deals (tell me when there’s a sale on flight from Newark to Seattle) 
• Health news (tell me when there’s some news about asthma, avian flu)
• Traffic (tell me if there’s bad traffic on I-695 during my commute hours)
• Weather (tell me when there’s a thunderstorm warning for my county)
• News (tell me when “obama” comes in the news)
• Earthquakes (tell me when there’s an earthquake in California)

 Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have more questions!

thank you, Dharani
Alertpedia: Looking out for you.

So, everyone is watching the real estate bubble wobble all around us in the USA. The buyers are watching the prices fall and waiting for that bottom . The sellers are watching the prices fall and waiting for them to reverse course.
Bottomline: Everyone is watching the house prices. Like,

• The neighbors sold their house for WHAT??
• What are houses like ours selling for these days in *my* area? (not just some nationwide average that groups Manhattan mansions with our Suburbia)
• When can I afford that McMansion in Sunnyvale?

The team at Alertpedia is happy relieved to finally add house price alerts to Alertpedia so that all of us can stay on top of this thriller. This is what you do to start getting your email alerts as houses go on sale in your area:

1.  Go to real estate alerts page on Alertpedia
2. Enter the ZIP code where you want to monitor house prices (you live there? you want to move there?)
3. Select a price range, type of house, # bathrooms, # bedrooms [or leave some of them as Any to get all the alerts for that Zip code. But, that may be too many.]
4. Submit

Simple. Now, sit back, relax, and let Alertpedia do the watching for you.

PS: One thing we know for certain: everyone needs shelter. The housing market will turn around one of these days.. or months.. or years. The rumor is that real estate is really hot on Mars these days!!

Dharani

Is it just us, or do you also feel that there are more kids with peanut allergies out in the United States than other parts of the world? And, more today than yesterday?

Here are the different explanations I’ve heard. Tell me what you feel. More importantly, share your solutions to this serious problem.

1. The premise itself is wrong. The spread of peanut allergies is the same worldwide, but it just gets reported more and diagnosed more accurately in the States. i.e., we must be, there’s no problem here!
2. Peanuts come from the ground in the rest of the world (”groundnuts”) - fresh and organic. They come in a Planters package in the US - processed and maybe genetically morphed to increase saleability and inadvertently making it less safe? i.e., Blame it on the Corporations!
3. Peanuts are the same everywhere, but the clean, low-germ environment in the States has made our children far less immune to nasty surprises that nature springs their way. i.e., Blame it on Cleanliness!

There may be a point with 3, nutty as it may seem. Somehow using chemicals (the ubiquitous Purel hand sanitizer) to wash off germs sounds like a zero sum game to me.

Well, what is the fix? Safer peanuts? Medical cures? or, a bit of germs all around?

Until then, this is what we can do:

1. let’s vow to keep schools peanut-safe (at least in the early grades).
2. monitor the news for any food recalls related to peanuts (and other allergens), and for medical breakthroughs related to allergies
3. share any news / recalls / recipes we come across.

Alertpedia addresses 2 & 3. Please tell your friends and families susceptible to allergies to use this free service to set up alerts and report news.

Stay aware and stay safe!

– dharani

This week we launched the new design. Believe us, developing PHP is easier than picking colors, any day.

In the end, Looks are not everything, but they are the first thing a visitor notices - and we know what they say about first impressions. We decided to go with the mainstream 2.0 look (reflections, shading, larger fonts) that is really popular these days and added our own minimalist, clean touch to it. The new logo is pretty cool, isn’t it? Kind of like digg, addthis, etc. There are plans for spreading it, stay tuned. 

But we also went beyond just cosmetics with this upgrade: we added easy social bookmarking links (via addthis.com) so that you can easily add any web page / blog / alert on Alertpedia to your favorite bookmarking site, like digg, delicious, reddit, etc.

What else did we do with this release..

• made it easier for users to participate: no logins needed to add comments.
• added RSS feeds
• added google ads.. ok, this is not a feature for anyone except Google
• fixed bugs, not that there were too many to start with
• and, did I say we revamped the site’s look and feel? like, adding a launch page?

Do you like the new look? Please provide your valuable comments on what you like or don’t like. Usability is easier with user feedback!
Here’s the OLD and the NEW at a quick glance.

- dharani

In my opinion, the Web is getting to a breaking point because of information overload. Just think about the number of sites you visit on a regular basis today vs. in the early days of web. It is not that the Web has less interesting stuff today, but that it has too many interesting sites with too much happening with a growing noise to signal ratio. End result: we come back from a 2hr stay on Wikipedia/digg/youtube thinking we just wasted much of that time.

So, how do we fix it? The answer lies in getting the things we want, when we want, where we want (and nothing else).

This is the Push Web, Pub Sub web, Alertpedia, etc. Web 3.0. It is more proactive and personalized than Web 1.0 and will look as good as Web 2.0.

Here are some of the elements of a successful Web 3.0:

1. Open content channels: I think that the tools for this have been slowly gathering: RSS feeds, Atom, Yahoo Pipes, Channels (remember them?). I don’t think we need to wait for the ultimate “semantic web”, but some more specialization of these protocols will help. E.g., I like CAP (Common Alert Protocol), Geo RSS.

2. Usable interfaces: Geeks like us know and love RSS feed readers, but the Billions of regular folks are not as comfortable with them as they are with IE / Firefox. Agree? I feel that answer may actually be already here: Emails and Text messages. Or, someone will come up with a new Push browser. We don’t want another Pointcast though.

3. Content manipulation / filtering: How to combine 10 feeds, filter the junk out of them, personalize them for my preferences? Yahoo Pipes goes a long way. More to be done in making it easier to use for regular folks and personalization. Plus, we have very little patience for an uninteresting email alert. So, the content filters have to get much much smarter.. dare I say semantically capable and intelligent.

4. User generated content: With the necessary digg-like quality management by peers, reputation systems, spam filters. Much richer in content filtering than Web 2.0. Read [3] above.

5. A scalable publish-subscribe server: Imagine a world where every piece of information is submitted to a googleplex-like server farm, the content is analyzed, extracted, filtered, and matched with subscriptions in real time, and alerts go out in real time. Imagine getting a real time google alert as soon as some web page in Tanzania mentions your name. That requires a serious scale in data volumes (which search engines have tackled) and speed (which no one has tackled well so far).

6. New protocols for publishing, delivering, and subscribing to the content efficiently, cleanly, in a REST-ful kind of way.

7. And, to get it all started, a Killer App for Push content. We believe that Alertpedia, Knownow, Pubsub are all worthy attempts towards that goal.

dharani

http://www.alertpedia.com - Previewing Web 3.0, today.

We have just added two new alert categories by popular demand:

Traffic alerts: Get alerts when there is congestion / repairs / jam on your commute road during the times you pick.

e.g., email me when there is bad traffic on I-278 at 8AM. We will send you alerts during 7-9

Travel alerts: Get alerts when ANY airline announces a price cut between two US cities.

This is why Craigslist works better than Ebay for me: it is local, it is fast. You want something, you look up in your area on craigslist, find it, drive down 15min, check it out, bring it home, done.

Instant gratification and the ability to check out the product beats buying a black box from some seller in Estonia.

But the secret is out. So many people are buying via craigslist that items disappear before you get some free time to check it out. On the other hand, you can’t skip your work and meals and watch craigslist just in the hope that someone will post that Wii for $50.

Alertpedia to the rescue. You can now receive alerts when there is a posting about some item on Craigslist in your area. Isn’t that neat?

Like, how about a Wii on sale for $50 in new york city? Wouldn’t we all love that?