How To Track Yourself On The Internet

If you are a website owner, it's quite possible that you're also either a writer and/or a potential celebrity of sorts. If you write for online media, no doubt you'll want to track yourself and whether people are talking about you. If you own/ run a business (whether online or not) which gets talked about online, you'll want to track yourself. Or maybe you're just starting up and you want to track yourself.

You're in luck. If you get talked about online on either websites or weblogs, you can use Google Alerts to deliver email notices to you of article excerpts. The delivery is configurable, but unfortunately, this service has no RSS counterpart. This would incredibly nice, and productive for writers like myself. However, it is in beta, and hopefully web feeds will be added.

On the other hand, you can track yourself in the blogosphere with an RSS feed. Just use Technorati's search feature to find references to your full name, company name, product name, secret lover or whatever. Move the "authority" slider to the level you want (any authority to a lot of authority). Then add the search to your Technorati "watchlist" (requires free account). You can then view your list in three ways:

In the browser, on your watchlist panel, for the search term you added to your watchlist. (You get one collapsible panel per search term.)
In mini form. This opens a small browser window that for all intents and purposes looks sort of like a miniature RSS reader. It displays the headlines, and a collapase/ expand triangle icon. Clicking on the triangle for a headline shows you an excerpt of a blog post that contains your search term. The only annoying thing about this mini-viewer is that it refreshes every 60 seconds and isn't configurable.
In your RSS reader. Each search term you add to your watchlist gets its own feed URL, visible as a blue "RSS" icon at the bottom of each list's collapsible panel. Another fine example of gigantic web feeds.

As for methodology, if you are a blog writer tracking references to your name, you can also use this as a method to track how regularly Technorati is indexing your weblog. Just make sure that at the bottom of every post, you write your name in full, in a copyright statement (assuming you wrote the piece.)

If you're searching for specific references to you in relation to a product or company, etc., Technorati allows you to add complex search terms by using logical operators such as AND or OR.

For example, If you wanted to search for articles on, say, RSS which also had a reference to Rok's name, you would use RSS AND "Rok Hrastnik". This would show you all the RSS-related articles in the blogosphere that either Rok wrote, or which reference him in regards to RSS.

If you wanted to track RSS-related articles which are by either Rok or myself, or reference one of us, you'd use RSS AND ("Rok Hrastnik" OR "Raj Kumar Dash").

In summary, both Google Alerts and Technorati have their benefits for tracking terms that are of importance to you. But Google's will be a whole lot better if they were to add RSS.

>> Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Technorati Tags: rsscases, rss cases, google alerts, technorati, track yourself, web feeds