RSS in Plain English - Part 1

Want to know what your competitors are up to?  How can you stay informed and maintain a strategic advantage over your competitors?  Read here to find out.  Today and tomorrow this article will set out several sites where you can carry out your free RSS Ego searches.  All comments welcome.

RSS Ego Searches – Part 1

By: Sharon Housley

Ego searches are free and simple searches designed to monitor blogs and news portals for mentions of your company, product, competitors or other specific keywords. Conducting ego searches not only allows you to stay informed, but also allows you to maintain a strategic advantage over competing companies. A number of new Internet services are freely available that make these 'ego searches' painless and easy.

Dynamically created keyword based RSS feeds, update in your RSS reader or news aggregators, each time new information containing the keyword appears in the searched resources. The dynamic feeds match requests against new information, as it comes online in real time. The following free services allow for RSS feed ego searches.

Google News

Simply conduct a keyword search of Google News and then click the text that says "RSS" then save the url of the RSS feed in to your news reader. Every time a new article with that keyword appears in Google News the feed in your RSS reader will automatically update.

http://news.google.com/news

BlogPulse

Find out what is being said about your products, company or your industry in the blogosphere. Conduct a keyword or url search on BlogPulse. Click the orange RSS icon above the search results and save the feed in your reader. Each time the keyword appears in a blog indexed by BlogPulse you will receive a new item in your feed reader. Another feature of BlogPulse is it will graph the keyword occurrences, providing a picture representation so that trends can be easily visualized. Hovering over the lines of the graph will provide details of actual blog mentions.

http://www.blogpulse.com

PubSub

Search on a keyword, then save and add the feed to your RSS reader using the icons provided. Optionally with PubSub you can direct your search to only alert you of posts in specific areas of interest including Press Releases, SEC/EDGAR Filings, Newsgroup Posts, or Weblog Entries 

http://www.pubsub.com

Technorati

Create watch lists, by entering the search term add item to the watch list and then scroll to the bottom click the blue RSS icon to obtain the url of the RSS feed that can be added to your reader. Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere. In order to setup a watchlist you will have to create a Technorati account.

http://www.technorati.com

Although they sound daunting ego searches are simply good business sense.

Author Bio
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for FeedForDev http://www.feedfordev.com an RSS component for developers.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com

Source:  by Sharon Housley

http://www.articlegeek.com/internet/rss_articles/rss_ego_searches.htm