Earlier this week I wrote about Customer Service in the Blogsphere. Really quite a cool story. But it prompted a comment about how to actually do the monitoring.

Then I realized that was something I wanted to write about but haven’t yet! So here goes…

First is getting alerts via email. The second is getting alerts via RSS.

Alerts Via Email
I’m sure there are plenty of ways to do this, but I’m going to mention two.

Google Alerts monitors their Google News for the keywords you give them. Every time that keyword comes up in the news, they’ll shoot you an email. Or you can set it to mail daily. Set up an alert for each key word or phrase you want to monitor. But be specific. With all of these alerts, if you put in something generic, you’ll get a lot of alerts! Also, use quotes to make it most specific. So, for example, instead of looking for internet evangelism, look for “internet evangelism”.

The other one in email is Yahoo! Alerts. It works just like Google. However, with Yahoo! you can have it sent to a mobile phone, Yahoo! Messenger, or email. So you’ve got a bit more flexibility with them.

Alerts Via RSS
In my opinion, this is better and more versatile. But it means you have to be on top of RSS feeds. For this, there are several but I’ll mention two again. BTW, you may want to read up a bit on how to stay up on RSS feeds first. In short, I recommend either Sharp Reader as a desktop application for PCs or Bloglines as a great website.

The first one I’ll start with is Yahoo! again. They have a cool news via RSS system that is worth checking out. But if you scroll down, you can see that you can create your own customized news feed. Same rules apply. Keep it specific, use quotes, etc. I think you can separate with a comma to get more into one feed. Or just create a couple feeds. Then subscribe to those feeds.

The second is a site called PubSub.com. To be honest, I can’t explain it all that well. But this guide will: Lazy Person’s Guide to being a NewsMaster: Use PubSub to track your URL, name and keywords. PubSub does a really good job in RSS monitoring and I’ve found they seem to be on top of stuff pretty quickly.

Now I know there are others. One of mention is Technorati.com, probably the best blog search engine out there. There are other things like subscribing to Flikr, del.icio.us, and Technorati feeds, but I haven’t gotten into that yet. They use a technology called tags or folksonomies.

Anyone else have any advice on how to monitor the blogsphere?