By: Charles Bowen Keeping Up On News Without Watching
To get started, visit the site at http://www.tveyes.com
Robots have been an American fantasy for most of our lives. They are movie stars, from Robbie the Robot in 1956's "Forbidden Planet" to Yul Brynner as the spooky android gunslinger in 1973's "Westworld" to Robin Williams in last year's "Bicentennial Man."
Moreover, they are part of our domestic fantasy. Any child of the '60s who watched Rosie the Robot on "The Jetsons" would dream of some day having a staff of household automatons to do the family's bidding.
But who knew that the Internet would fill this bill? The Net has become our first practical robot for information gathering. The mid-1990s were notable for showing us the joys of Web surfing, and the late 1990s were notable for teaching us that we also could let the Web surf itself. Just send out our automated avatars and let them return with the treasures they find for us while we're off doing our human business - such as eating, sleeping, and working.
Now the Web's robots will even watch TV for us. Monitoring the closed captioning of TV 24 hours a day, tveyes.com is a free site that lets you track TV content by keyword, instantly notifying you of hits by e-mail, by Instant Messenger, or by pager. You can obtain a transcript of the text where your keywords appear, as well as a brief history of the previous mention. And the site can link you to the Web sites of the show or the network where the keywords were mentioned.
"Though tveyes has many apps for a variety of interests," said the site's innovator, David J. Ives of Southport, Conn., "I originally designed my software after I dabbled in some day-trading and saw the huge impact TV mentions had on stocks." Ives figured that if he could keep tabs on all the times a stock got a TV mention, he'd have a better idea of how that stock might perform. From that grew Ives' patent-pending technology and its related Web site, which now boasts more than 10,000 registrations a month.
To take advantage of this intriguing technology, visit the site (http://www.tveyes.com), enter your e-mail address, then type in a word or topic in the provided spaces and click the "Submit" button. When your keyword appears in the closed captioning of any of the broadcasts the site is monitoring, you receive an e-mail alert.
Also, as a first-time visitor, you have the option to choose a password, which enables you to use the site's "Keyword Manager." Type in any password you choose, then retype it to verify, click the "Submit" button, and you're on your way. Once you are registered, you can click the "Keyword Manager" option on the introductory page to add and edit the keywords you are monitoring and change how you want to be notified (e-mail, pager, etc.).
Other considerations in using tveyes.com for your writing and editing:
The site doesn't list the TV resources it is monitoring, but a news release from Infonautics Inc., which has launched a co-branding agreement with the site, says the tracking includes CNNfn, CNBC, Bloomberg, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX News,
C-SPAN, ESPN, and selected public TV stations.
The "Keyword Manager" lets you edit "Preferences" for each search word you save, specifying the number of alerts you want on each mention from three to 10 and what broadcast categories you want monitored (including sports, news, kids, financial, entertainment, etc.).
An "Advanced Filter" preference also can be used to reduce the number of mentions in proximity. Microsoft, for example, could be mentioned numerous times in several related stories in a single newscast. The filter presents those mentions as one so you don't receive 10 e-mail messages containing the same transcript.
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Bowen writes columns, articles and books from West Virginia, and is host of the daily Internet News syndicated radio show (http://www.netnewstoday.com).
charlesbowen@compuserve.com
Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher
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