What You Should Know About

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 keep you informed, but also makes it possible to maintain a strategic advantage over competing companies. A number of new internet services are freely available, make these ' ego searches ' painless and easy. Dynamically created keyword based RSS feeds, update in your RSS reader or news aggregators, appears each time new information containing the keyword in the searched resources. 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 -just do a keyword search Google News, and then click the text that says "rss" save the url of the RSS feed in reader news. Each time a new article with the keyword appears in the Google news feed in your RSS reader is updated automatically.
http://News.Google.com/news Blog Pulse -Find out what is being said about your products, your company or your industry in the blogosphere. Carry out a keyword or URL-search on Blog Pulse. Click the orange RSS icon above the search results and save the feed into the reader. Each time the keyword appears in a blog indexed by Blog Pulse will you receive a new item in your feed reader. Another feature of Blog Pulse is it will graph the keyword occurrences, make an image representation, so that trends can be easily visualized. Hovering over the lines in the graph will give details of the actual blog mentions.
http://www.blogpulse.comPubSub -search on a keyword, then save and add the feed to your RSS reader, use the icons provided. Optionally with PubSub direct your search to only warn you of posts in specific areas of interest including press releases, SEC/EDGAR Filings, newsgroup posts or blog entries
http://www.pubsub.comTechnorati -create watch lists by inserting the keyword to add the item to the list watch, then scroll to the bottom, click the blue RSS icon to get the URL of the RSS feed can be added to your reader. Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is happening in the blogosphere. In order to setup a WATCHLIST you must create a Technorati account.
http://www.Technorati.comIce Rocket -just investigate Ice Rocket then click button RSS 2.0 download url to the RSS feed that contain 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 scanner routinely magazines and publications for the keyword mentions. Perform a search, and then click the "RSS Alert" for 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 all imaginable topics. Enter your keywords in the search box. Click ' Search ' click on the orange XML icon on the right side of the page with search results, and save the feed to your news reader.
http://www.newstrove.com BlogDigger -BlogDigger monitor the blogosphere and, in General, what has to be said daily in blogs. Make a search on Blogdigger, and click the orange XML icon to retrieve the url for the search feed. Feed should then be added to your RSS reader.
http://www.blogdigger.com/DayPop -perform a search and click the icon to the right, say XML, save the feed to your RSS aggregator. Only the most recent search results will be displayed.
http://www.daypop.com Yahoo News -perform a search, and then click "show as RSS" in the right column, save the feed in your aggregator. The feed will check the Yahoo News for denominator.
http://News.yahoo.com/Overall, ego searches are an excellent way to keep you informed and maintain a strategic advantage over competitors. To know exactly what your competitors are doing online gives a competitive advantage that can be used to your advantage. Keyword RSS feeds can be used to monitor key phrases to trademark abuse or monitoring the effectiveness of a specific press promotion. Although the sounds scary is ego searches simply good business sense.About the author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing and publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for FeedForDev http://www.feedfordev.com an RSS element for developers.