Blog Monitoring Services - Do It Yourself Instead

This is something we are going to see more of. Unfortunately...
CyberAlert has launched BlogSquirrel, a service that monitors 100,000 blogs. In Sweden Observer has started doing the same. Well, they are reading 10 blogs :-)

Don't get me wrong. I like all entrepreneurial efforts. And good luck to CyberAlert and Observer if anyone wants to buy their service. I actually had a related idea, and on my corporate site I market a service. But my approach - which I think is the most long-term viable approach - is to help my clients do it themselves. Why should anyone pay for a service (the monitoring) that is freely available and working?

So, if anyone of you has missed this - here's the quicklist on how to create your own blog monitoring:

  1. Find the keywords you want to monitor. This is not difficult. Copy the keywords you use in your press monitoring. And feel free to expand the list. It wont cost you more money with more keywords.
  2. Get started with a RSS-reader.
  3. Subscribe to searches. A couple of resources are
    - Bloglines (do a search for a keyword and click on the really big button that says "Subscribe To This Search")
    - Feedster (do a search and subscribe to the XML feed of the result page)
    - Daypop (see Feedster)
    - Blogdigger (See Feedster)
    - PubSub (follow the instructions)
  4. Watch the results drop in.
I see at least three advantages with this approach.

  1. You will monitor more blogs. PubSub for example tracks 3 million blogs, to compare with the 100,000 - but you can limit it to the most "important" blogs.
  2. It is cheaper. This will take you (or the IT-department) 3-4 minutes per keyword. If you have 30 keywords we are talking about a couple of hours to set it up.
  3. You will learn about the infrastructure (subscribing etc.) of blogs.
Disadvantages? Possibly that you will monitor more blogs, and get results from blogs that are not very influential. Today. But who can say which blogs that will become influential?

Posted by Fredrik Wackå Thursday, November 11, 2004
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