Element Fusion

When you run a business, or a website, or a website about your business, it's pretty handy to keep up with other people who are talking about you.  But the web is a big, huge place, so how can you keep track of it all?

One way is to take advantage of search feeds. You already know about RSS feeds, right?  If you don't, take a look here, here, and here. Alright, now that you're all caught up, let's take it to the next level.

What if in addition to subscribing to RSS feeds that pull content from single blogs, you also subscribe to RSS feeds that pull content from internet searches on particular keywords.  For example, let's say your company is named "Super Awesome Company 2000." You create a search feed that basically says "go out and perform a search on the keywords 'super awesome company 2000' and put all articles found into my RSS feed and deliver them to my reader.  Oh, and do this all the time throughout the day so I never miss anything."

That would be pretty cool, right?  If only it were somehow possible to do such a thing ...

Method One -- Google

1. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com.
2. Type in the search phrase you want to use and click "search blogs"
3. This will return a search results page, look to the left and find the "subscribe" area (see image)
4. You can click "Blogs Alerts" to have Google to send you email when a new matching article is found, but this can really clutter up your inbox and it's not nearly as cool as using RSS, so...
   
5. Click the RSS icon.
6. This will take you to the RSS feed page for that search.
7. Look up in the address bar of your browser. Highlight the address of this page and copy that address to your clipboard.
8. Open up your RSS reader application and paste that address in as a new subscription.

Method Two -- Technorati

Woah! Looks like Technorati has a little styling issue with their subscribe button! You can still click it, though.

1. Go to http://www.technorati.com and click "join" to create an account.
2. Once you've signed up, login and click on "Watchlist"
3. Look for the box that says "Add to your watchlist" where you can type in keywords for the searches you want to perform, then click "add".
4. Technorati builds a listing of your searches in the main area of this page. You can expand each search to view matches right on the page.
5. But, you can also subscribe to each search by clicking the subscribe button above each listing (see image). Click "subscribe" then copy the address of the resulting page to your reader, just like you did with the Google example.

Using these two methods you can easily filter through all of the content on the web to find the things that matter to you most. Use them to find articles about your company.  Use them to find articles about your competitors.  However you choose to utilize them, search feeds can help you stay on top of a lot of content in a short amount of time.