tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7346520062335584992.post9115343330156169661..comments2007-10-03T20:10:51.889+13:00National Library of New Zealandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05067703181520460430noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7346520062335584992.post-64763939945988352382007-10-03T20:10:00.000+13:002007-10-03T20:10:00.000+13:00For the record: technorati brought me here!<BR/><BR/>You ask a slightly complex question actually. <BR/><BR/>If you want to just keep a pulse on the web in general - to see what everyone is up to, then it's really hard to go past a daily browse of something like <A HREF="http://popurls.com/" REL="nofollow">popurls</A> : gives you the latest/most popular sites, memes and news from all the major sites (from metafilter to delicious to flickr to youtube and tens of others) all on the one scannable page, with mouseover snips.<BR/><BR/>To see who mentions my blog, I use technorati mostly, but by far the most accurate way to discern who has mentioned you is a page statistics service (I use statcounter). The reason the stats service is so good is because not only does it show in real time where there's a mention, it also pulls up a lot of (for whatever reason) unindexed sites and more specifically, hidden sites such as forums -- ie. it is accurate in advising what site the visitor has come from: my daily count and the referral sites are the only stats I look at actually. <BR/><BR/>I am a 'content chaser' (looking for digital collections of images) and I find a lot of high branch fruit by backsearching to sites and forums from the stats page.<BR/><BR/>I've been using GoogleAlerts for about 6 months and I think they are mostly useless. I only use them for content though, so I can't put them down as a self-researching service. But you mention 2005 having come up; well, I have perma-searches on 'new digital exhibition' and similar terms and I constantly get very very useless returns from pre-2000.<BR/><BR/>That said, I do believe, if memory serves me well, that I originally found the NZ Proceedings via Alerts so it redeemed itself that way!<BR/><BR/>The best, most efficient modes to search however require a bit of in depth knowledge: yahoo pipes, smart URL string searches, search term rss feeds. They require some time at the start but if they are tweaked right, they ought to leave simple term (eg. NZ Proceedings or the somesuch) searches for dead. But again, it depends on how serious you want to be and what your ultimate goals are. If it's just navel gazing then I think technorati +/- blog search +/- stats review is enough.peacayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997731249622552311noreply@blogger.com