Google Alerts is my primary source of news outside of rss feeds, and has introduced blog notification about a week ago. The service is still in beta, buy I have been using it religiously for about 6 months now. It is a great way to stay on top of news. I wanted to actually test it out before I commented on the blog addition though.
Google Alerts will notify you weekly, daily, or every time something is indexed in its engine with a keyword that you specify. For instance, one of my keywords is ‘data mining.’ Everytime there is news about ‘data mining,’ it let me know via email. Now with the new blog service, when someone blogs about data mining and Google picks it up, it let me know as well.
Basically, when I want to monitor a market such as ‘WiMax,’ I will enter the keyword into Google Alerts. Then, I will gauge the activity around that market and figure out how often I want to be notified. If it is still a developing area, I might want to read about it every week, but if it is going crazy, I will switch it to daily. The added blog notification has given me a lot more information to sift through though, leading to later post times if you haven’t noticed!!
The cool thing is every once in a while, I will get notified of my own articles. It’s always kind of nice to read what you wrote, outside of visiting the site! Not to mention, the traffic here has shot through the roof in the past week. I wonder if that is why?
To sign up a Google Alert, click here. Also, Problogger wrote a great article on the Alert service as well.
