McFilter

Keeping Tabs On Who Is Talking About You

As part of the work I've been doing to help out for the Our Social World conference, I've been looking into ways to find out which blogs are linking to, or talking about, the conference so I figured it would be worth summarizing my findings here.

Most of these services provide RSS feeds too, so you can add them to your RSS aggregator and stay up-to-date with what's happening.

You're It

Tagging (basically free-form keywords) is big at the moment and if there's an obvious, and fairly unique, name for what you're doing then there's a good chance people will use it when referring to you.

del.icio.us, the social bookmarks service I've written about before lets you see what bookmarks have been made with a given tag, and also provides an RSS feed so you hear about newly tagged bookmarks when they get added.

Similarly, Technorati have recently branched out from just being a blog search engine (more on this in a bit) to provide searching based on tags. So, for example, you can find all the blog posts which have been tagged with our+social+world.

Searchin'

When it comes to blog search engines (think Google, but just searching through blogs) there's quite a choice, and there doesn't seem to be a lot to choose between them...

• I think Technorati were the first into the market, but have suffered as a result with their servers sometimes getting overloaded. However, they seem to be recovering, and with the additional tagging search are starting to regain their edge
• Feedster are perhaps best known for their RSS-feed splicing services, but also offer a who's linking to whom search engine.
• Bloglines offer a search facility alongside their web-based RSS reader, but don't provide an RSS feed of the results. You can subscribe to the results feed if you use Bloglines as your RSS reader however.
• IceRocket.com is a fairly recent entrant, but their search results don't seem to be as comprehensive as those of their competitors.
• Finally, there's also PubSub although that seems less immediate in its response. Whenever I've tried creating a subscription it's returned no results, and I've lost interest before finding out if the results get any better over time...