SEC Form 4 Info to hCard Microformat
Anthracite does Microformats! This is pretty exciting for me. I know that many customers are using Anthracite’s web mining tools to do sales prospecting work, including many using SEC Edgar filings to get particular kinds of leads. Well, I’ve seen the Microformats craze taking off, and then I interviewed Chris Messina on KGNU about BarCamp, and then I realized he was involved in the Microformat revolution, and I decided I just had to make Anthracite work with this stuff. So, introducing SEC Form 4 Info to hCard Format, a new ready-to-run solution included with Anthracite. It’s a set of three Anthracite documents and an Automator workflow to tie it all together. The latest form info is scraped from the SEC, a particular filing type is extracted, and then all those filings are harvested for contact information which is then converted to the hCard microformat. You can use Technorati to convert these hCard pages into Apple AddressBook .vcf files, I’ve seen it work with my own eyes! It’s pretty slick, if I may say so, and I know that many customers (and soon-to-be-customers) are going to like this, too. It will be included in the next release (1.6.1) which is due out hopefully tomorrow (if testing goes well tonight) [Ed Note: Okay, make that Thursday, instead]. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need help customizing this to meet your needs.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006