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Ego Searches and RSS
By Sharon Housley (c) 2005

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.

Automated tracking of specific subjects or industry trends,
based on keywords, provide businesses a great deal of valuable
information. Ego searches are a great way for businesses to keep
an ear to the ground, without having the expense of conducting
a market survey or competitive analysis. Businesses can use the
free "ego search" resources to stay informed about what
customers are saying.

The 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.

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Editorial Note: If you have not yet installed RSS Reader/News
Aggregator software, we recommend the following popular freeware
readers/aggregators:

BlogExpress - Easy to use and has built-in Web viewer.
http://www.usablelabs.com/productBlogExpress.html

Pluck RSS Reader - Browser-based RSS reader plug-in for Internet
Explorer and/or FireFox. http://www.pluck.com/

SharpReader - Handles all RSS versions. Numerous useful features.
http://www.sharpreader.net/index.html
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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 into 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

Ice Rocket - Simply search Ice Rocket then click the RSS 2.0
button to obtain the url of the RSS feed that contains your
search term. Add the url to your RSS reader or newsaggregator.
http://www.icerocket.com/

Find Articles - Traditional media channels can even be monitored
using RSS. FindArticles routinely scans magazines and
publications for keyword mentions. Conduct a search then click
"RSS Alert" to obtain the url to the RSS feed. Add the feed to
your reader to receive instant notification of new articles.
http://www.findarticles.com/

NewsTrove - NewsTrove indexes millions of news articles from a
myriad of sources. Build an RSS feed on any topic imaginable.
Enter your search words in the search box. Click 'Search', then
click the orange XML icon on the right side of the search results
page and save the feed to your news reader.
http://www.newstrove.com

BlogDigger - BlogDigger monitors the blogosphere and generally
what is said daily in the blogs. Conduct a search on Blogdigger
and click the orange XML icon to retrieve the url of the search
feed. The feed should then be added to your RSS reader.
http://www.blogdigger.com/

DayPop - Conduct a search and click the icon on the right that
says XML, save the feed to your RSS aggregator. Only the most
recent search results will appear. http://www.daypop.com

Yahoo News - Conduct a search then click "view as RSS" in the
right column and save the feed in your aggregator. The feed will
check Yahoo news for mentions. http://news.yahoo.com/

TalkDigger -  TalkDigger is a meta-search engine. The results
of which can be displayed using RSS. TalkDigger essentially
aggregates the mentions that occur in a number of other blog
search engines. http://www.talkdigger.com

Overall, ego searches are an excellent way to stay informed and
maintain a strategic advantage over competitors. Knowing
exactly what your online competitors are doing provides a
competitive edge that can be used to your advantage. Keyword RSS
feeds can be used to monitor key phrases for trademark abuses
or monitoring the effectiveness of a specific press promotion.

Updates to RSS feed searches occur in what could be considered
realtime. An additional subscriber benefit to RSS based ego
searches, is that subscribers don't have to release any private
information or an email address, to monitor keywords. Although
they sound daunting, utilizing free resources to conduct ego
searches is simply good business sense.

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Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll
http://www.feedforall.com 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.
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