On 10/17/06, Michael Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[...] I'm currently talking with CL about the use of their data and as of now it's not looking too good. Any tips?
I can understand their nervousness; the entire value of Craigslist is in them being the authoritative source for all things cheap, weird, bartered, and/or resold within a region, and offering up their database for anyone else, no matter how noble their cause, is probably a slippery slope they start down. There's also the question of whether it resembles a kind of CL-supported surveillence -- while I fully support all kinds of nasty things being done to bike thieves, other people feel the same way about other types of behavior, and once they open their database to you, it would be more difficult to argue in good faith that no one else (incl. law enforcement) should be given the same access. Regardless, you might check out the eBay RSS feeds -- you can get a fairly up-to-date feed of any eBay search query, which might be an interesting (and potentially much larger) source of data. Sellwood Cycles also publishes an RSS feed of new consignments, though given the nature of their resale transactions (ID req'd, paper trail incl. serial #) and degree of involvement in the community, I can't really imagine them selling a stolen bike. I've also been thinking about how this could perhaps be turned into something a little bit simpler and more general -- say, a "planet"-style aggregator with pluggable filters for doing things like keyword search, Bayesian filtering, etc. It wouldn't have the same "brand", but it could be useful for a whole variety of applications beyond finding stolen bikes. -Lennon P.S.: Are you still having trouble scaling the matcher? I've been playing around with some other algorithms (specifically, vector space search), but if you've got things settled down pretty much where you'd like them, I'll probably put that work on hold and move to other projects. _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
