Monitor the Web

Wouldn't it be nice to know every time someone writes about you on the internet?, or every time someone mentions your school, or you favorite football team?

Well, actually you can...

There's something called Google Alerts that makes the trick. With it you can create search based alerts that send email notifications whenever there's a new search result for a specified searched text.

There are three types of alerts supported so far, Web, News & Web and Groups. It's possible to set the frequence as: once a week, once a day, and as soon as it happens.

I'm using it pretty heavily to spot web content on open source c# help desk, and sinergia help desk, being my project I want to know as soon as possible if it makes any noise on the web.

Right now, I'm also monitoring for references to:

• my full name,
• my most used nickname (gabo_uy),
• my email addresses,
• the url of my sites,

I have different frequences set, for the different terms. I'd go for... the more unusual the searched text, the higher the frequency. I tried setting everything to as soon as it happens, but before I knew I was like mail bombed, completely annoying.

Believe me, it's funny to see what it turns out...

The mail sent can be configured to be text, or html. The html email, is actually well formed xml, so I guess It wouldn't be difficult to parse it and develop some sort of web event listener engine, taking the received mails as input. Would this be of any use to anyone?