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Bot! :-]

DrugSenseBot automatically tracks the very latest  breaking drug news from around the world, many times an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You just can't get more recent breaking drug news, anywhere.

This newsbot searches online sources, automatically categorizing the text. It transforms sites into specialized, strategic RSS news feeds on cannabis, medical marijuana, harm reduction, opioids, hallucinogens, and much more. News articles are automatically summarized.

Bot turns online news sites into RSS XML news feeds whether or not the source itself has news feeds!

This site is a tool which assists mapinc newshawks (news analysts) in gathering the latest drug-related news. The system acts as an agent to find and fetch the latest drug-related news articles from news sites.

see chart: Bot's place in the MAPInc data collection scheme.

Bot's technology is able to extract unstructured information from pages around the web and translate it into categorized knowledge that activists can use to improve their effectiveness.

Using content analysis, Bot filters news articles for drug-related news items, fetches, analyses and transforms the news article text.

This newsbot's transformation of news text is a central feature of this process because it makes possible the ongoing critical commentary and analysis of drug-related news. Textual transformation includes re-formatting, concept detection, classification, and mark-up.

Unlike RSS aggregators, this news bot scans the actual news artcles themselves, not just a pre-packaged article summary as most RSS aggregators do. Unlike simple keyword schemes (as google news uses for searching and mail-back), this newsbot uses a subject-specific (drug policy) dictionary to go beyond simple keyword techniques.

As the name "bot" implies, this whole process is automated. No manual intervention is used at any stage of the process.

Concept-based analysis translates phrases and words to their underlying concepts; for example, "cannabis", "marijuana" and "THC" would all index to the same concept.

The concept dictionary defines the "concepts" used for the content analysis, classification and markup process. This is a thesaurus-like organization of related search terms that is used by the system to classify articles, to summarize articles, and to selectively follow links when examining a site.

• reduces the time and effort it takes hawks (news analysts) to find relevant news items
• reduces the volume of irrelevant documents retrieved (high precision)
• is readily adaptable to new domains (topic areas)

The news articles here are not automatically hawked, that is left for the human readers of this site. The transformed news article remains here for a few days and is then deleted.

also see:

• DrugSense Newsbot: an Overview - white paper

• Bot's RSS and XFML news feeds

• Frequently Asked Questions

this newsbot site: established in 2003 ... In 2011, science "discovers" a wonderful new techique! --

• Filtering Out Propaganda from the Medical Literature (May 2011)

• A Propaganda Index for Reviewing Problem Framing in Articles and Manuscripts: An Exploratory Study (Eileen Gambrill; Amanda Reiman; May 25, 2011)

• A journal article which analyzed this drugsense newsbot site! Melanie Feinberg, (2011) "How information systems communicate as documents: the concept of authorial voice", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 67 Iss: 6, pp.1015 - 1037