Using Craigslist To Fight Crime (StPaulChurch10-21.Wikispaces.com)

The effort to crowdsource a solution to the rash of church burglaries in St. Paul has been making some headway of late. One of the more interesting products to come out of the effort is a whitepaper on how to automate the collection of data using the RSS feeds from Craigslist.

Craigslist is an online classified advertising service that is available for many towns and cities. It is no surprise then that criminals try to use it to fence stolen goods. This is not a new phenomena (criminals use whatever is available and popular to sell stolen property -- pawn shops, flea markets, even, upon occasion, print classifieds). Craigslist cooperates with local law enforcement to keep their trade legit but, given the volume of listings, there is no way they can eliminate all of the traffic.

Being able to quickly scan Craigslist for known stolen items, then, seems to be a valuable tool in the law enforcement analyst's arsenal. Mike Himley, President and CEO of Eagle Intelligence, and a major contributor to the crowdsourcing effort on the St. Paul's churches, has come up with a simple tutorial that allows anyone to set up such a scan. I could easily imagine this as a part of a classroom exercise or as a real tool to help law enforcement identify and recover stolen property.

Even if the St. Paul Church Burglary crowdsourcing initiative does nothing but add these kinds of tools to the analyst's arsenal, it has been more than worth the effort.

How-To: More On RSS Feeds

I promised a bit more about RSS feeds and how to make them useful. First, in case you forgot or you have not had time to read the previous two posts (Part 1 and Part 2) in this series, let's take another look at why RSS feeds are a good thing in the video below:



Most feed readers today offer many other features besides simply making RSS feeds accessible, however. Google Reader, my preferred reader, offers a wide variety of options for managing the data that comes into the reader as do most other readers.

For example, Google Reader allows you to star items or tag them with key words so they are easy to find later on. You can also easily share items of interest on other forums or websites. For example, all of the items in the SAM's Shared Items box at the right are items that I picked out of my reader and "shared". This allows me to simply and easily feature documents and articles on this site that I would otherwise never have time to write about.

Adding feeds to a reader is so easy and can prove to be so useful that it is also necessary to go back periodically and weed out those feeds that are no longer helping. Fortunately, most readers can track some of your usage data and will help you make these decisions. Google Reader, for example, provides a "Trends" feature that tells you, among other things, how often you actually read a particular feed as well as how active a particular feed is. In this way you can easily keep your subscriptions from growing out of hand, avoiding, in the process, turning out like this guy:

How-To: Automatically Translate Foreign Language Blogs And Websites Using RSS Feeds, Google Reader And Mloovi (Part 1)

Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds is one of the easiest ways to get the web to push relevant information to you. It never ceases to amaze me, however, how few people know how to use these feeds.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to start getting access to RSS feeds using Google Reader and then (tomorrow) how to use Mloovi.com to automatically translate feeds from foreign sources and get those feeds into the reader as well.

Beginning at the beginning: What is an RSS feed?

RSS allows blogs and other websites to actually broadcast their content to the wider internet. Anyone who tunes in to a particular feed can have any new content appearing on that feed instantaneously pushed to an RSS feed reader (The advantages to this are substantial for analysts. Check out Push Vs. Pull Sources And Killer Intelligence Apps or this video by Michael Wesch for additional discussion of these advantages).

Step 1: Choose an RSS feed reader

The easiest way to tap into RSS Feeds is through an RSS feed reader (sometimes called an aggregator). This piece of software tracks the feeds you want to read. There are many readers out there and the discussion of which is best is a continuing subject of debate. I like to use Google Reader. It is simple to use, has good support and, because it is a Google product, you can reasonably expect it to remain around and improve over time.

Step 2: Sign up to use the reader

Google Reader requires you to have a Google Account. If you have Gmail or access to other Google web-based services, you likely already have a Google Account. You would use the same username/gmail address and password to sign into Google Reader as you would for Gmail or any of the other services. If you do not have a Google Account you can sign up for one here for free.

Step 3: Identifying a feed

You can subscribe to any site that has the RSS feed symbol in the address bar. Below is the address bar for SAM. As you can see, at the far right, there is an RSS feed symbol meaning that it is possible to subscribe using an RSS feed reader.

Step 4: Subscribe to a feed

Once you decide which feed you want, you will need to subscribe to it in your feed reader (in this case I will use Google Reader as an example but many other readers have similarly easy to use features). While there are several ways to do this, perhaps the easiest for the new user is to merely copy and paste the address of the blog you want to subscribe to into the "Add Subscription" bar on the middle lefthand side of Google Reader (see picture below). Once you have entered the feed, click on the add button.

Many large websites (such as CNN and ISN) have multiple RSS feeds. You can subscribe to all or some of them. For example, CNN's feed page allows you to pick and choose the feed you want. Simply copy and paste the feed into the "Add subscription" bar in Google Reader, click add and you are now subscribed to that feed as well.

If you want to have Google News Alerts on a particular topic sent to your feed reader as well, that is also relatively simple. Merely search for the news topic you want using Google News and then right click on the RSS button in the left hand column of the results from your search and then click on "Copy Link Location" (see image below). Paste this into the "Add Subscription" bar and click add. This technique should work with any news aggregation service that offers RSS feeds, not just Google News.


Once you have added the feeds to your feed reader, you can go back to the reader at any time and see what sites have posted updated content. Every news article, every blog post from all the content providers you think are worth tracking gets automatically and seamlessly sent to one place where you can then read, delete, forward or file with ease.

That is enough for today. Tomorrow I will walk you through how to identify and automatically translate foreign blogs and websites and get them into Google Reader.

The Holy Grail Of US Government Information (U.S. Government RSS Library)

The always helpful Marcus P. Zillman has done it again. Today, he highlights the US Government's RSS Library. On one site, it is now possible to find virtually all of the USG's daily feeds on everything from health to defense to consumer affairs. Given the amount of research the US funds, these feeds could prove to be invaluable to any researcher. In addition, there is substantial value in having this info "pushed" to you automatically through RSS feeds rather than having to find and "pull" it from the internet.